Liquid Territory: Subordination, Memory and Manuscripts among Sarna People of Sulawesi's Southern Littoral

by

Jennifer L. Gaynor

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology and History) in the University of Michigan 2005

Doctoral Committee:

Professor Rudolf Mrazek, Co-Chair Professor Ann L. Stoler, Co-Chair Professor Nancy K. Florida Professor Bruce Mannheim Professor Janet Hoskins, University of Southern California UMI Number: 3163799

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2004 I am not afraid of drowning for I sail with the Bajo and even have a Turije'ne' at the helm.

Makassarese poem*

*Matthes (1883: 60). "Turije'ne," literally "people on (or of) the water," is a Makassarese synonym for "Bajo people," who call themselves "Sarna." The meaning of this kelong, Matthes explains, is that I will reach my goal ("I will, for example, get the consent of a certain girl"), since I am aided by people of great discretion and influence. This may be the sense if one takes it metaphorically, but I would still rather sail with the �ama than with Pelni (Pelayaran Nasional Indonesia, the National Shipping Lines). Acknowledgements

I would never have made that first trip to the Sarna village of Lagasa on the outskirts of Raha if it hadn't been my good fortune, well before I went to graduate school, to find friends - Christian as well as Muslim - who were all headed home on an overcrowded ferryfrom the provincial capital Kendari to Raha in order to celebrate the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. I thank Meynder Lawolu for introducing me to

Jeni Gamganora, who at the time brought me to the house of her mother, Yohana

Talabessy (Almarhuma). "Ibu Yo" was highly respectedin the community for her work in education and for raising a number of children that became, through doing so, effectively also hers. She never missed an opportunity to chastise me ifl neglected to come eat meals and stay at their house, even though to have a foreigner stay over was against official rules. I am grateful to all of Ibu Yo's family, but especially to her children

Jeni and Joice, to the latter's daughter Veronika, and also to Alan - who a few years later and a few feet taller recognized me on the street and called out, in fictive siblingship or perhaps just familiarity, '"Kak Jen!" Throughout sporadic staysin the town ofRaha, the domestic space ofibu Yo's benevolent matriarchy, while "external" to my interest in things Sarna, remained a place of warm welcome long aftermy research interests took me elsewhere. The death of Ibu Yo cut deeply and I am glad, if that's the right word, that I was there to share the family's grief and pay my respects.

ii The ferry trip from Kendari to Raha is one I would make many times, usually in

the pilot house of a great lumbering old wooden boat (nothing like the cramped plastic

speedboats of later years), where the captain stood at the helm, a proper wooden wheel in

his hand. That first ferry trip to Raha in 1990 was undeniably a fateful one, for on board I

also met Sumima Limuna who introduced me to KamatuddinThamzibar, a young man

who had grown up in Sarnavillages. Sumima didn't know it at the time, but Kamaruddin

would later become his brother-in-law. This punster, thinker, and friend, whose humor

and integrity gained him the respect of Sarna and non-Sarna alike, this anchor who risked

sharing his political awakening in letters at a time when this was still a risky thing to do,

generously provided me with an entree to more than one Sarna community in the area.

Many of my subsequent relations with Sarna people throughout the region can be traced

back to his introductions to extended family in the villages where he spent his youth.

Although there are far too many to list here, those members of this extended

family in Raha and the Tiworo Straits region who I must thank are: Lo Kadir, M.

Marhaling, Pak Ndalle (Almarhum), Nurhawana and Hasanuddin, Nuhba, Hatia, Gebing,

Tikungrahman, Haji Mansyur and Mbo' Rasuking. Further afield, I am grateful for the

generosity ofHaji Buraera andHaji Lawi, as well asHaji Umar Nanga, the Imam of the

Poso Mosque, who, to my amusement, addressed his correspondence to me as "Genever"

(Dutch for "gin"). I �lso wish to thank Mukhlis Paeni, who sponsored my visa twice

while he wasHead of the Indonesian National Archives: first during the ten months that I

intensively studied the Bugis and Sarna languages, and then during a subsequent year of

dissertation research. Thanks are also due to AbdurraufTarimana (Almarhum), an

anthropologist and later Rektor ofHaluoleo University,for earlier visa sponsorship and

iii an introduction to his candid colleague Muslimin Su'ud. Thanks to Abdul Kadir

Manyambeang for assistance with Mak.assarese; and for wonderful conversation to the

old scholar Daeng Mangemba, who, though largely blind now, still has the delightfully sharp edge of an irreverent wit. The capable and ever-patient Muhammad Salim was both

linguistic informant, teacher of Bugis language and translator. My work in Bugis would have been impossible without his diligent and kind assistance. The entire staffof the

Jakarta and South Sulawesi branches of the Arsip Nasional Republic Indonesia I thank for all their professional help. In particular, Ani, who helped me follow up a lead on a

"/ontaraq Bajo" (which turned out to be about a place called Bajeng), and Arfa Sarna, who put me on the trail of yet another Sama-owned Bugis-language manuscript.

Although that manuscript trail ran into a dead-end, another, of a sort, materialized in its place. For this I thank Haji Kua and her daughters who (eventually) showed me the letter that theyrightly prized, and let me experience, for the first time since staying at Ibu Yo's, how different it was to be in a house with no adult men.

Research was supported jointly by an International Dissertation Field Research

Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral

Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship (P022A80050). An International Pre- dissertation Fellowship Program award from the Social Science Research Council in the previous year supported intensive language study of Dutch, Sarna, and Bugis.

For help with Sulawesiana and for just being a truly fine colleague, thanks to

Sirtjo Koolhof at KITLV; also to Annabel Teh Gallop at the British Library for her generous help; to Russell Jones, for having a look at fragments of a lontaraq; and to the

iv Royal Asiatic Society, where curators flashed me a privileged peek- up close and in person - of their illuminated manuscripts.

For their support and encouragement I would like to thank Rudolf Mrazek, Ann

Stoler, Janet Hoskins, Bruce Mannheim and Nancy Florida. I also wish to thank the following: for feedback on a verison of chapter 3, Stuart Kirsch; for encouragement on chapter 4, Andrew Shryock; for comments on a verison of chapter 5, Erik Mueggler; for encouragement and suggestions on a version of chapter 6, Barbara Metcalf and Penny von Eschen; and for checking my Dutch translations, J. Henrike J. Florusbosch. Heartfelt thanks to the erstwhile writing group of which I was a part: Teny Woronov, Lourdes

Gutierrez-Najera, Helen Faller, JeffJurgens and Sarah Munro. I am also grateful for the feedback I received from participants in the '0 1-'02 Global Ethnic Literatures Seminar overseen by Tobin Siebers, and the members of the History Dissertators Colloquium under the insightful guidance of Kathleen Canning. In addition, useful feedback was provided at the 2002 Association for Asian Studies Dissertation Workshop on "Memory and the Politics ofldentity," in particular from David Szanton, Shelly Feldman and especially Toby Volkman. For their patience, love, and willingness to listen as well as to play, thanks to Martin Zabron, Erica Lehrer and Maggie Kitmir. The final stages were made vastly more pleasant by the presence of Joshua Coene, for which I am grateful. All errors are of course mine alone.

v Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 11

Map Vll

Chapter 1 Introduction 1

Chapter 2 The seas as political imaginary and the place of Sarna people 23

Chapter 3 The decline of small-scale fishing and the reorganization of livelihood practices 46

Chapter4

I l Tales of the Sarna past 92 I Chapter 5 Looking for /ontaraq 155

Chapter 6 Ambivalent incorporation: Sarnapeople and the Darul Islam rebellion 221

Chapter 7 [: ·:. ' Conclusion 252

Bibliographic References 264

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Introduction

Sarna people, called "Bajo" by their neighbors in Sulawesi, are known throughout

the region as "sea people." Scattered across Island Southeast Asia - in Indonesia, Eastern

Malaysia and the Southern Philippines, these sea people have no taken-for-granted

"homeland" and no history of political unity. During the pre-colonial period they became

intertwined in various political systems of the region, yet they did not become

appreciably identifiedwith any one kingdom over others. With neither a presumptive

"homeland" nor any singular area of exceptionally dense concentration, one consequently

finds that there is no obvious location that stands out as the logical place, literally, to begin an account of Sarna people or a consideration of their pasts.

In different parts of the archipelago, Sarna people - or some of them in any case - formed loose ties with local realms, for instance, with the Sulu Sultanate in the Southern

Philippines, and with the kingdoms of Gowa and Bone in South Sulawesi. It would, however, be mistaken to think that the relations Sarna people developed with non-Sama others merely followed a logic of proximity, or to imagine that in a given area their loyalties were always directed exclusively toward a particular center. We cannot, in other words, presume that the picture of Sarnainteractions with others was guided simply by physical nearnessand that, as a result, whatever kingdom was closest became the focus for the creation of alliances or patron-client ties. Proximity alone, of course, provides an

insufficient way to explain contact and interaction between groups, since it pays no heed

to how social contexts and motivations helped shape the character of different encounters

and connections. Yet there is another, perhaps more fundamental, problem with looking

to the region's historical kingdoms in order to understand Sarna interactions with others,

and hence, how they were entangled in social and cultural histories that cut across the

boundaries of place and ethnic group.

The urge to tie Sarna people to particular realms, to locate -or to emplace -them

by pointing out their apparent links to such centers, can lead to rather unsatisfying

analytical results, depending on how it is handled. For while physical proximity to and

social connections with one or another kingdom were undoubtedly useful for Sarna

people at times -they were, after all, centers of trade and political authority -

nevertheless, a methodology that directs our focus towards these centers and the

perspectives one has looking out from thempresents particular- even distinctive -

shortcomings in the face of questions about how Sarna pasts and presents areanchored in

an archipelagic history.

The conventional historiography on theregion, however, points us in precisely

this direction, while predominant approaches to regional ethnography similarly orient us,

if not toward kingdoms, nevertheless toward particular places and what things look like

from the points of view of the people in them. There is nothinginherently problematic

with these approaches. Yet, in the context of work on Sarna people and maritime space,

these approaches may guide us -like a compass meant for use on land rather than at sea­ in the wrong direction.

...

2 On the one hand, the conventional historiography lays out a picture of insular

Southeast Asia as a multi-centric world set in a vast neutral sea, a space to be traversed, across which interconnections within the region are usually seen as a function of trade links between centers. On the other hand, ethnographic methodologies have focused largely on particular descent or ethnic groups in a given place, rather than on the relations between them and how these intersect in practice with broad crosscutting structures, for instance, of stratification. One may, just to put a finer point on it, characterize both the conventional historiography and the predominant ethnographic methodology as approaches that, albeit for somewhat different reasons, have in common a focus on locality.

In contrast with both of these approaches- center-focused networks and place­ centered patchworks - Sarna people, who are scattered throughout insular Southeast Asia and who have neither a taken-for-granted "homeland" nor a locale of exceptionally dense concentration, delineate in their narratives and practices complex and sometimes far­ reaching networks. These networks usually do not converge on centers, yet they do involve interconnections with non-Sama others aswell as with Sarna people in other parts of the archipelago. One of this dissertation's primaryanalytical aims is to explore in depth this contrast with views of the archipelago as historiographicallymulti-centric and ethnographically patchwork, by looking at what happens with maritime space in Sarna practice and in the representation of their practices.

Since notions of maritime space have played an important role in ideas - both scholarly and political- about Southeast Asian regional space, I first examine prominent examples of such scholarly discourse, and outline how maritime ideologies have

3 appeared in the formulation of regional political imaginaries. Then, in the rest of the dissertation, I examine three Sarna-focused arenas of inquiry- livelihood pursuits, stories of the distant past, and recollections of conflict -that offer examples of practice-oriented perspectives on maritime space. Through this approach, I hope to avoid some of the shortcomings entailed by a focus on locality. For the purposes of this study, a focus on locality falls short on four interrelated matters, each of which I take up brieflybelow, namely: mobility, the importance of relative distance, the variety of networks and the variability of social contexts.

A focus on locality and an orientation toward what happens in the orbit of centers can divert one from looking at forms of Sarna mobility in practice, as well as at how these have changed. Colonial sources make it clear that Sarna people were not just dispersed in the archipelago; they also moved about from place to place. Their diverse economic pursuits on the seas and coasts and their apparent lack of a taken-for-granted homeland led colonial Europeans to regard them as "sea gypsies" -a designation at once romantic and derogatory. Yet one should not rely on colonial stereotypes of "sea gypsies" to get a sense of their mobility in the past. Fortunately, a few scattered references in the sources describe the movements of Sarna people in relation to specific places and for particular reasons. Their mobility has not been an unanchored nomadic wandering but has had a variety of causes: from flight in the face of slave raiding or conflict, to the pursuit of a livelihood based primarily on mobile resources.

Since their movements have not been predominantly between "centers,'' and the places they have congregated or built settlements have for the most part been away from major nodes of trade and political authority, one should wonder about the nature of the

4 links Sarna people apparently had with such "centers." Should these links even be a

priority in an examination of Sarnapasts, and if so, how? To what degree can they be

examined from Sarna points of view? And what do we learn about the character of such

links and how they are spatialized in Sarna practices, memories and stories of the past?

One thing revealed by following through on these questions is that Sarna links to such

centers were often maintained not in close proximity to them, but rather at a relative

distance from them.

Not only were allegiances and affiliations maintained at a relative distance; they have also proved to be quite portable, and hence, implicated both in Sarna practices of mobility and in their networks of aquatic transit. Sarnanetworks, then, in addition to the material ones related to livelihood, have also been social ones, comprised, for instance, of kinship and genealogical memory- including, sometimes, ties to other groups. Such networks follow shorelines and criss-cross archipelagic spaces. Sarna people do not all necessarily have to travel these interconnected spaces in order to gain "geographic" (or perhaps, "thalassographic") knowledge about them, as long as they hear about the movements of friends, family and prior generations to and from places both near and far, places often referred to with Sarna language toponyms.

The travels of Sarna people to and through these places did, however, put them into a variety of social contexts, settings in which their allegiances had some importance.

As I describe in chapter five, for instance, a person passing in the mid-nineteenth century from the east coast of Sulawesi to the west, moved between areas in which the predominant authority lay, in turns, with the Bugis, the Dutch, and Gowa. One Dutch source remarked on how the allegiances of a certain Sarna man shifted accordingly from

5 one place to the next. Yet, it was also the case that one's ability to demonstrate a

connection with a particular center could have social efficacy in a place relatively distant

from it. Thus, another source from around the same time mentions that a Sarna man who travelled from northeast Borneo to south Sulawesi received there, on the one hand, a royal "open letter" - a testimonial or recommendation of sorts - from the ruler of Gowa, and, on the other hand, a Dutch flag. These tokens of allegiance not only symbolized his subordinate position in relation to those authorities. They also became, on his return to northeast Borneo, portable evidence of his connections to them, and were useful vis a vis others, even at some distance from where they were bestowed.

I draw out these points on mobility, relative distance, networks and social contexts in order to indicate just how a focus on locality may limit our perceptions of the spatial dimensions of social relations in regional maritime history and in the geography of differencein the archipelago. To get beyond this critique of how a focus on locality can restrict our imaginations and methodologies - at leastwhen it comes to exploring questions about Sarnapeople and their pasts - I would like to offer a contrasting image. It is a provisional image that I hope will help readers conceptualize how, through analysis of both seaborne practices and their representation in memory and story, the materials in this dissertation use a different approach to illustrate maritime space in Southeast Asia. It is also an image arguably more relevant to a dispersed seafaring people of the region who do not tie their sense of ethnic collectivity to a particular place of "origin" in it, and whose lives and livelihoodsdo not coalesce around its familiar centers. Conceptually less like a map that a nautical chart, in this image the lands rather than the seas become the negative space; the centers of political authority and dense economic activity melt and

6 reform over time; and the networks that span and connect Sarna people - both to other

Sarna folk as well as to those of other descent groups- do not link centers with other

centers, but rather intermittently connect myriad "small" but not necessarily "remote"

coastal places to each other.

This image represents, like all maps, an imaginary place. But it is one that may be

useful to bear in mind in view of how Southeast Asia's maritime space has itself been

represented and mobilized toward different ends over time. In Chapter Two, I outline this

history of the region's maritime and archipelagic space, in particular, how it was

progressively territorialized, and how "maritime ideologies" have been a crucial

component of political imaginaries in and of the region. This is not a history of sea space

from particularly Sarnapoints of view, since Sarna people do not have, or at any rate have

not yet formulated or managed to record, transmit and disseminate, such sweeping,

objectified views of the region's seascapes. Nonetheless, it is important to include an examination of how these seashave been represented here, for in addition to the role

played by "maritime ideologies" in both past and emergent formulations of regional

identities, the process of territorialization underwritten by those ideologies has definitely had a bearing on Sarna people. On the one hand, territorialization gave the state control over the material resources they rely on to survive. On the other hand, it was partof a process that had the effect of making Sarna people appear to be out-of-place, just about everywhere except in colonial fantasies of them. As increasingly territorialimages of the sea were harnessed to supra-local notions of belonging, social collectivities within the region became more strongly identified with (localized) notions of territorial space on

7 land. Against the backdrop of this process, Sarna people came to appear as ethnically

anomalous, despite a history of regional political space envisioned as archipelagic.

Partly as a result of how this space was progressively territorialized - both

ideologically and through administrative organization - Sarna people wound up on what I

call the edges of governance. I use "the edges .of governance" to refernot simply to a

geographic or administrative structure, but to describe a social location from which Sarna

people have often dealt with subordinating structures, processes and events. As a

theoretical notion with potentially broadapplication, it has, I think, the advantage of

fostering an attentiveness to practices of dealing with subordination that may not, or may

not only, fall under the categories of "resistance" or "accommodation."

Finally, as a necessary part of my efforts in the wider project to rethink the

relationship between place, history, and ethnicity in maritimeSoutheast Asia from

perspectives relevant to Sarnapeople, this look at regional conceptions of sea space providesan analytic backgroundfor the subsequent chapters. That is, Chapter Two gives readers a sense of how the region has been viewed as an entity, before such an "entity" potentially threatens to dissolve in the myriad movements and relocations that traverse this space, presented in the analysis of particular narratives and practices that follows.

Chapter Three anchors a sense of mobility in several material practicesthrough which Sarna people pursue their livelihoods. While the role of the region's sea-people in the maritime andcoastal produce trades has long been remarked upon by outside observers, historical sources give few illustrations of both the variety and the forms of mobility related to Sarnalivelihoods in practice. Similarly, they offer few insights on how these practices have been affected by shifts in political economy; hence the main

8 emphasis in the chapter is on relatively recent times. After presenting some historical

background, in this chapter I examine how environmental resource depletion and shifts in

the organization of production in the "rural littoral" have wrought changes in Sarna

livelihood practices. These changes are especially notable both for the kind of labor

involved and the role gender plays in it, as well as for how its organization articulates

with larger, spatially flexible, political-economic structures. A virtual chorus of

commentators since the late nineteenth century(e.g., Matthes in Sopher 1965: 156 ) have

reiterated claims that Sarnapeople are either "more settled" or have "more contact" with

other groups than previously, and that, as a consequence (in "classically" modernist

nostalgic form), the disappearance of the Sarna, or their loss of identity, looms in the sad

but near future. This chapter raises sharp questions about mistaking social transformation

for cultural death and directs attention instead to the ongoing prospects for Sarna social

reproduction, despite the far-flung distribution of Sarna communities and the transformed

circumstances in which they pursue their livelihoods.

In Chapter Four I examine a variety of Sarna tales of the past from different parts

of the region, some attested in the literature through re-presentation by nineteenth and

twentieth centuryEuropean and American observers. Since Sarna people have no taken­

for-granted "homeland" and no history of political unity, their stories of the past invoke

neither an ethnically based long-ago kingdom, nor a land of origin. Comparative analysis reveals that these varied Sarna tales from different parts of insular Southeast Asia have two main things in common. First, they are not about origins, but rather share a framework of relocation from one place to another. Although the places vary, relocation always takes place over water. Second, despite variations in the storyline and in the

9 degree of narrative elaboration, most of the tales share a concern with social inequality

and the potential for subordination resulting from the dynamics of interaction between

members of different descent or "ethnic" groups. Unnegotiated marriage - in particular,

the theft of a high-status Sarna woman and the subordination it implies for her kin group

- is a consistent theme in these tales of the past, whether represented straightforwardly or

through euphemism.

In Sulawesi's southern littoral, related versions of the Sarna past in narrative are

more elaborate than elsewhere and are passed on both orally and in Bugis·language

manuscripts. These stories- political myths of a sort- tell how Sarna elites became

intertwined with other royal families in the region, and they contain explicit assertions of

genealogical authority. I argue that how these stories of the past represent and re-figure

the theme of social subordination informs recent social practice, by offering Sarna people

strategies for understanding, re-valuing and contesting the apparent realities of complex

social hierarchies. These stories have, in particular, unmistakable parallels in Sarna recollections of the 1950's Darul Islam rebellion or "DI-TII" (Daru/ Is lam - Tentara

Is lam Indonesia, Darul Islam - Indonesian Islamic Army). As with other narrative traditions of Southeast Asia, Sarna narratives of the distant past thus provide an allegorical interpretive context for understanding events in the lived world and how they may be represented. While the variations between the tales, and especially their toponymic fluidity, evoke a metaphorical sense of liquid territory, these stories also depend on the seas in a very literal sense. For in them, both flight and dispersion, as well as connections over great distances, are mediated by maritime travel. Although the

10 waters, here, are not a character but the setting, we should not forget that they establish the material conditions of possibilityfo r how these Sarnanarratives unfold.

These narratives about the past are also important fo r the material ways they have been textualized, and fo r what both their oral and manuscript transmission signifies. In

Chapter Five I situate Sama-owned Bugis-language manuscripts (lontaraq) vis a vis the textual traditions of the region. This enables me to link analysis of the semantic content of texts-both narratives of the distant past as well as royal letters of recognition-to how manuscripts have been valued as objects in Sarna practice. Considered to be heirloom objects, these rare manuscripts continueto index high-status descent among

Sarnapeople. Although access to them is restricted, they do occasionally circulate, both in fact and in rumor. Since the possession of not only texts, but also knowledge about

Sarnanarrat ives of the past bears a special significance, even rumors about ownership can be quite important.

In addition to paths of inheritance, the circulation of these manuscripts is also part of regional practices of "borrowingn texts, usually among extended kin, and sometimes for use in inter-ethnic contexts as a wayto substantiate elite descent to potential marriage partners. As with relocation in the tales of the past, practices of textual circulation similarly involve a maritime dimension. In fact, both the transmissionnarr of atives orally, as well as the circulation of manuscripts through inheritance and borrowing, not only take place intergenerationally, but also, frequently, across expanses of water. The dissemination of texts must, however, be understood historicallyin two political contexts: first, as part of how South Sulawesi kingdoms expanded their political authority, and second, in light of the late colonial state's approach to indirectrule - for the Dutch both

II drew on andextended indigenous textual practices, especially as these related to

genealogy andsocial distinction. They did this, first, in order to recognize local elites,

and subsequently, to confer "native authority" in "locally" recognizable ways. Under

indirect rule, "native"authorities, for their part, also altered certain practices of

representation in the texts they createdand which they sometimes bestowed on Sarna

people.

Thelegacy of such textual practices in legitimizing status, as I discuss in Chapter

Five, is complexly intertwined with a history in which practices of marriage negotiation

play a key part in the social acknowledgement of status, as discussed in C�pter Four. As

Chapter Five illustrates, the use of lontaraq manuscripts as a form of "proof'' of high

status Sarna descent that also holds up in the eyes of other descent groups, is one of the

main reasons why some "borrowed" manuscripts take the particular paths they do. The

flipside of this concern with substantiating elite Sarna lineage is the less obvious unease

associated with the implications of unnegotiated unions. Unnegotiated unions disallow

the acknowledgement or recognition of status claims. Yet more than this, they imply a

kind of being-brought-down, something that affects not only an individual but also

reflects on her kin. A concern with this dynamic of using unnegotiated unions as a

mechanism to subordinate members of one group to those of another is clearly evident in

Sarna stories of the distant past (as mentioned above). Yet the poS$ibility for non­

consensual wife-theft, in particular, to be taken as a subordinating act also turned out to be a very real factor in how some Sarna people became entangled in the 1950's Darul

Islam rebellion.

12 In Chapter Six, I look at the storyof a Sarnawoman kidnapped by DI-Til rebels

to be married to a regiment commander, the brother-in-law of the rebellion's leader in

Sulawesi. Whereas most studies of DI-Til focus on the leadership of the movement or its

defeat by the central government's army, my research suggests that DI-Til in Sulawesi expanded, in part, by forging new kin ties across ethnic groups. Kidnap and coerced

marriage, however, produced an ambivalent incorporation of"supporters, " as well as retaliation by some Sarna people. Agents of the newly independent state misrecognized this retaliation, portraying it, as archival documents show, in nationalist terms as,

"resistance against the rebels by the people.11 If it wasre sistance, though, it had little to do with nationalism and rather more to do with a rare instance of revenge. This divergence of interpretations is less a matter of frames of representation that operate at different scales, than an instance in which oral history reveals the inadequacy of the archival sources. The authors of the latter appear to have been ignorant of the context fo r revenge and were incapable of rendering the social mechanisms and dynamics at play in the generation of unfolding events. More often, instead of retaliation, Sarnapeople chose maritime flight. As Chapter Six shows, recollections of the 1950's portrayed maritime flight as one of a variety of means by which Sarnapeople maintained social spaces that worked to keep the exercise of dominance and the violence of both sides of the conflict at bay. At some times, these social spaceswere in the overlapping grey areawhere people were compelled to engage the methods that each side of the conflict used to exert their authoritative sway. At other times these social spaces created more elbow room for Sarna survival in the interstices between competing powers.

13 The examination of practices in the following chapters - in the pursuit of

livelihoods, in renditions of the Sarna past, in the treatment of manuscripts, and inthe

methods of dealing with violent conflict in the 1950's - stands out against an abundance

of materials·that, rather than examine Sarna practices, rely heavily instead on

generalizations about ''the Badjau" and on observations made across a chasm (or an

ocean) of social distance. "The Badjau" is the exonym used for Sarna people in colonial

discourse, and, until recently, in much of the literature. While colonial stereotypes of"the

Badjau" as "sea gypsies" rendered them as romantically exotic natives, Sarna people in

contemporary Indonesia are generally viewed as "formerly nomadic" and consequently as

no longer "original" (asli), no longer the-real-thing. In Indonesian state-sponsored

classifications, Sarna have been counted among so-called "isolated tribes" (masyarakat

/erasing), while in popular discourse they are sometimes simply called "primitif."

Positioned this way between no-longer-as/i and not-yet-modern, Sarna people appear to

some as an ideal target for development projects, and serve as a kind of foil against which iJ I" (implicitly non-Sama) "modem" Indonesian subjects might imagine themselves.

Despite current perceptions of them as "formerly nomadic," many of these

mostly-coastal-dwelling, predominantly poor, Muslim fisherfolkdo still get around on

the water. Relatively large numbersof Sarna people live along the east coast of Sulawesi

and around its southeastern peninsula. Southeast Sulawesi's total population in the year

2000 was about 1. 7 million and my conservative estimate of the Sarna population in that

province alone at the time of research was roughly 200,000. Primarilyfocused in the

Tiworo Straits region of Southc:ast Sulawesi, my fieldwork also extended north along the

east coast to Lasolo Bay, to related communities on islands in the Flores Sea to the south,

14

�� to islands offthe coast of Sinjai in South Sulawesi to the west, and to other points along

the arc of the Gulf of Bone. The greatestconcentration of Sarna people in Southeast

Sulawesi live in and around the Straits of Tiworo where they make up about 90 percent of

the population.

The Straits ofTiworo is a place historically on the margins of competing political

systems and then later on the periphery of rival administrative units. In the late 1660's,

the Dutch and their local allies, including Bone, fought a war that altered the balance of

trade and power in the entire eastern archipelago. Prior to that point, the region's greatest

trading powers- Gowa, in South Sulawesi, and Temate, further east- each laid claim to

th Tiworo. Since the late 17 century,Tiworo has been at the margins of influence of two

closer kingdoms, also significant centers of trade. These were the Bugis kingdom of Bone

in South Sulawesi, and that of Buton to Tiworo's southeast. After the Dutch defeated

Bone in 1905 and shortly thereafter brought the archipelago's "outer islands" more or less

under their administrative control,Tiworo was passed back and forth between different

regional administrative units in the colonial and post-independence periods.

These conflicting claims to Tiworo do not necessarily indicate that it was so

valuable a place that regional powers fought over it. If thatwere the case, one would

expect there to be more evidence of debates about it in the archives. Instead, it seems that

Tiworo was more like a pawn, the kind of place one could afford to sacrifice in broader

negotiations and struggles over power in the region.

Tiworo itself was not a place to which outsiders often went, at least not in the past

two centuries. In fact, the major trading routes passed right by it, and to unfamiliar

mariners its shallow waters could be hazardous. Yet for Sarna people, the semi-protected

15 waters of the Straits provided an ideal environment for their way of life focused on the seas and coasts, within a day or two's sail from regional trading towns where they could sell dried fish, or sea-cucumber bound for export to China.

contrast to lowland and coastal areas, we often think of upland areas of In

Southeast Asia, to borrow Anna Tsing's phrase, as "out-of-the-way" places. But coastal regions like Tiworo are also perceived by many in Southeast Asia as remote - not so much because they are far from administrative centers, but because those who are oriented toward the land, who have lifestyles based, for instance, on settled agriculture or on industrial labor, do not spend much time on boats. For those oriented towardthe land, coastal places, except for ports and harbors, seem out of the ordinary and hard to reach.

Even in terms of maritime traffic, however, ships steered clear of Tiworo. Most maritime traffic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries went around the Straits. If one looks, for example, at the maps of the .KPM, the Dutch Royal Packetship Company

(KoninklijkePaketvaart MaatschappiJ), their routes through the archipelago grow denser over time, yet Tiworo remains a pocket that the .KPM ships skirted. Given the region's history of slave raiding and the perennial preoccupation - colonial and contemporary- with smuggling and piracy, such coastal areas offthe beaten track have held a special place in theimagination of bureaucratsand administrators.

Commenting on Tiworo in 1954, for instance, an official of the newly independent Indonesian state described in his monthly political report how it was not surprising that the Darul Islam rebels had reappeared in the islands of the Tiworo Straits.

These islands, he explained, "had always been the destination of marauders, since the

16 state did not yet have an armed presence there, due to their position and the difficulty of

' communications."

Such perceptions ofTiworo were not new. Inthe notes left by Admiral Speelman,

who led the forces against Gowa in the seventeenth century in order to gain control of the

port ofMakassar, the Straits were characterized in the most unflattering termsas "De

2 Lee/ijcke roofnest Tiboore"- "the nasty pirate's nestTiworo." There had been a realm

centered on a location of this name, on the northwest coast of Muna bordering the Straits.

But it is difficult to tell from the sources whether the local rulers considered themselves

"Tiworoese, n or if the name was merely a locative. It is also not possible to say for certain

who populated the Straits then, and whether, or how much, the population included Sarna

people. It is clear, however, given Speelman's characterization of the area, that seafaring

people lived there at the time.

1 "Warta Politik bu lan Maart 1954 DaErah Sulawesi Tenggara,'' in No.286/Rahasia. Bau- Bau 5April 1954. Held in ANR I (ArsipNasional Republik Indonesia) Makassar, Pro pinsi Su lawesi 1950- 1960, reg. 359. 2 There are two versions of Speelman's Notitie's relating to the 17'h century Makassar War. One is a typescript of a version from Jakartaand is held in the KITLV archives, #H802. The other is a typed version from Den Haag, with annotations by Noorduyn, and is, as yet, unpub lished. A searchof an electronic version of the latter turnedup this phrase characterizing Tiworo of the time as a "nasty pirate' s nest." This phrasethen also helped to clarifY the meaning of an earlier reference to Tiworo stating that it had been "cleaned." I am grateful to KITLV for help with the search of the Den Haag version. There is some conflicting infonn ation in the sourcesab out who defeated Tiworo in these campaigns. In Speelman's notes, Dav id Steyger is said tobe the one who defeated Tiworo. Bu gis language sou rces, however, ascrib e this fe at to Torisompae , i. e., Aru ng Palakka. Althou gh this pseu donym is not mentioned by Andaya ( 1981 ), it doe s appear regularly in Bugis manu scripts. To risompae is oft en used to refer to A ru ng Palakka, for instance, in a catalogu e of man uscripts titled "Dl Makassar" (in Makassar) and nu mb ered "I L I" in the Indonesian National Lib rary. "In Makassar" refers to manu scripts that presu mab ly belonged to the Matthes Stichting (Matthes Foundation), aft er independence called the "The Foundation fo r South and Sou theast Sulawesi Culture" (Yayasan Kebudayaan SulawesiSelatan dan Tenggara), a collection that itselfno longer exists. Fortu nately, it was microfilmed in 1972 by C.C. Macknight and �opies of the films are held in the Leiden University Library and at the Au stralian National University. In the contentdescriptions of this catalogue, two manuscr ipts are said to contain sections "Concerningafte r Tiworo was defeated by Torisompae " (" Membitjarakan sesudah kalah Tiworo oleh To risompae") (No. 58, pp. l4- 16 and No. 104, pp.3 1:-32). The manuscripts thus portra y Tiworo as hav ing been defeated by Arung Palakka during the Makassar War of the lat e 1660's, whereas, as mentioned ab ov e, notes from the time by Spee lman indicate that Tiworo, "the nasty pirate's nest," was "cleaned" by Steyger.,

17 ...... ------·------. --- ·------. ------.

Tiworo was chosen as the primary fieldwork site for two basic reasons: the

preponderance of Sarna people in the contemporary population, and my prior familiarity

with villages and people in the area from previous graduate research and pre-graduate

travel and study. My interest in manuscripts held by Sarna people, however, took me out

ofTiworo for a large part of my time in the field.This was a result of efforts to track

downmanuscripts rumored to exist, and to piece together information not just on whether

they might be found, but why and how they had apparently been moved across the waters

from one place to another.

Nothing did more to open my eyes to the long, tangled and sometimes tenuous

threads that connected Sarna people in different areas to each other, as well as to a past of

substantial interactions with other people in the region. In my earlier work (Gaynor 1995a

and 1995b ), I was primarily concerned with how the structures and discourses of

"development" contributed to the social position and material conditions of Sarna people

in contemporary Indonesia. While the impact of modernist discourses of development

ti I and of capitalist produc on in coastal and maritime industries are extremely important to I any understanding of their current circumstances, I nonetheless became dissatisfied with

the limits of this approach and wished to focus more research on questions with greater

historical depth and an explicit concern with the interrelations that Sarna people have had .

with others.

Research for this project was conducted not just in "the field" of the littoral zones

of South and Southeast Sulawesi and islands in the Flores Sea, but was also carried out in

a number of archival locations in Indonesia, Great Britain and the Netherlands. In

addition to the myriad oral/aural interactions and participatory engagements of fieldwork

18 -conducted mostly in Indonesian, often in Sarna and sometimes in Bugis -research for

the dissertation also used Bugis-language manuscripts, colonial records and post­

independence archives. I chose this combination of sources in order to investigate Sarna

maritime practices, perspectives on the past, and methods of dealing with subordination,

as well as to examine how outsiders have represented Sarna people and their ways.

The kinds of sources a historian might wish to have in order to do a "proper"

social history {say, a dense and richly layered archive in which Sarna points of view are

copiously articulated), do not appear to exist. Sarna people show up only occasionally in

colonial sources, and mention of them is sparsely scattered over the length and breadth of

the archipelago. Sopher ( 1965) is the main, and in some ways wonderful, resource that

gathers together hundreds of references to the region's "sea people." For some things­

observations of tripang or sea cucumber collecting, of drying fish for consumption and

sale, and for a record of the location of some settlements and favored mooring sites - this

is a useful resource. It is like a clearinghouse or an expanded catalogue of (mostly)

European resources on Southeast Asian sea people. Ironically, the subtitle of the work is:

"a study based on the literature of themaritime boat people of Southeast Asia." I first

obtained a copy of this work in Kuala Lumpur in 1990 and read it cover to cover in a

Sarna house while the tide washed in and out beneath the floorboards. By the time I was

finished with it I was ready to toss it out the door with the receding tide, so frustrated was

I with the fact that it had almost nothing to do with any Sarna points of view. "The literature" in question was entirely external; therewas not even any evidence that I could

see in the sources referenced of people who might actually have spoken some Sarna or

19 spent significant time living in Sarna communities. A wonderful resource, a great

disappointment.

Due to the social distance and lack of communication between Sarna people and

those who authored such materials, the latter tend to express perspectives that were

generally not oriented toward the concerns of Sarna people themselves. Sarnapeople

have a kind of ambiguous visibility in thesources, which is in part, but not only, an

artifact of colonial disregard and fantasy. I say "disregard" for two reasons: first, Sarna

people were of limited interest to the Dutch because they did not appear to be in positions

of power and were not considered the primary residents in the areas where they lived.

Second, as the Dutch largely left the coastal and maritime produce trade in the hands of

Chinese and indigenous traders, they did not keep records reflectingany interest or stake

in controlling the labor of Sarna people as initial extractors in these settings. I mention

"fantasy" as an issue in the sources because of the overwhelming preponderance of

colonial stereotypes of "sea nomads" or "sea gypsies," who seem to float in waters utterly

devoid of either social connections or social distinctions.

As if this were not reason enough for the ambiguous visibility of Sarna people in

the sources, thereis also the matter of their awkward social and political location in

relation to other groups of the region in whom the Dutch had a more pragmatic interest.

In other words, with no history of political unityand no taken for granted "homeland,"

but instead, a variety of obscurely established and decidedly tenuous connections with

I different figures and realms, when Sarna (or "Badjau") do appear in the colonial archives, ,,

it often proves to be almost incidental to the matter at hand, along the lines of "some

Badjau's occupy the islands offthe coast." Similarly, their appearance in indigenous

20 sources is extremely limited. I have only found two manuscripts (one in an archive and

the other in the field - see Chapter Four) that give more than mere passing reference to

things "Bajo." There is, in other words, extremely little about them in Bugis language

sources, but what there is raises a number of interesting questions.

The Sama-focused narratives of the distant past I examine (oral and manuscript)

are sources I use cautiously as a historian. Yet the sceptical analyst in me is pleasantly

surprised that a comparative analysis of tales from such disparate parts of the archipelago

should turnup so much thematic consistency. They not only have in common the frameworkof a maritime relocation. They also share a preoccupation with subordination in inter-groupdyna mics, thus revealing an abiding concernamong Sarnapeople in different parts of the archipelago who may have had very little to do with each other historically. Although it is not possible to map out the relations between these different versions of the Sarna past precisely, it is very likely that their thematic consistency has as much to do with the similar social and economic structural positions of Sarna people in diffe rentparts of the region, as with any "genetic" relationship among the divergent (but in some ways quite similar) tales.

As earlier sections of this introduction suggest, in writing about Sarnapeople, it is not only difficultto presume the existence of an anthropomorphized collectivity3 but is also well nigh impossible to signifysuch a mythical beingthrough the metonymy of place. This work hasneither an obvious "place" fromwhich to launch into a narrative of

Sarnapeople, nor does it lend itself to analysis conducted through the lens of a dominant political economic fo rmation. Unlike the colonial plantation system or the Atlantic slave trade, fo r instance, here, political economy does not appear to play as overwhelming a

3 Sahlins (in press).

21 ------· ------

role in explaining the dynamicsof Sarna social relationsin the past or in the present. The

approach here instead comes at questions about Sarna social locations and their relations

with others from a variety of interrelated angles: structural-ideological,political­

economic, kidnap and kinship, stories of the past, the significance of manuscripts, and

methods of holding combatants at bay. Examining an array ofpra ctices that touch in

different ways on Sarnarelations with others - carried out, fo r the mostpart, in coastal

and maritime worlds - produces a pictureof the complex dynamics of stratificationand

subordination in inter-ethnic social fields.

This dissertation thus highlights not just instances of "resistance" but a variety of

ways that Sarnapeople have responded to and dealt with subordination in those inter­

ethnic social fields. Some practices of dealing with subordination examined here do not

easily, or do not only, fall under the rubric of"resistance." This includes, for instance,

creating and taking advantage of interstitial spaces in order to survive, and the

possibilities (conscious or not) fo r believablyrefiguring subordination in retrospect.

Ultimately, the dissertation is anattempt to understand the shapes of Sarna subordination

in the past, and their social positions in the present, by examining the traces of a history

of inequality and survival at the edges of governance- a social, not a geographic,

location.

22 Chapter 2

The seas as political imaginary and the place of Sama people

This chapter is an effort to consider how conceptions of sea space have been integral to political imaginaries in Southeast Asia, and what their implications are for

Sarna sea people. While in other parts of the world, national ideologies were often expressed in relation to a homeland, for Indonesia and the Dutch East Indies before it, geopolitical notions of place included the seas in increasingly explicit and more territorialized ways. While I touch on imperial, colonial, national and post-national settings, I focus here primarily on how the space of the seas was articulated in maritime ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In addition to examining maritime ideologies fromdifferent historical moments, I also explore how they may inform our understanding of changes in the configuration of social differencein the region, especially in the Southeast Asian littoral. Maritime ideologies offer a privileged view into political imaginaries, yet they also suggest how the structures of governance were changing during the late-colonial and post-independence periods. These changing structures of governance, linked to increasingly territorialized notions of space and belonging, have played an important role in shaping contemporary

Indonesian ideas of "ethnic" difference and the apparently anomalous position that "sea people" occupy in relation to others.

23 I begin the chapter with a look at the "free seas," Hugo de Groot's Mare Liberum

composed in the early seventeenth century. Despite its mercantilist setting, the Mare

Liberum had an anti-imperial rationale -opposed, that is, to Iberian domination in both

hemispheres. Ironically, a similar sense of the seas as the common inheritance of all

mankind appears in the remarks of a contemporaneous Southeast Asian ruler who

protested against Dutch attempts to monopolize trade. the late colonial context these In

seas appear along with their island chains a grand image of archipelagic empire. in

Nusantara, a fourteenth century Java-centric term of reference fo r others, was reinvented

in this nineteenth century context and it went through various permutations to become,

much later in the twentieth century, an icon of a unitary national territory. Maritime

ideologies were also a vehicle fo r the agendas of early twentieth century anti-colonial

nationalists. They used the Malay tenn tanah air, the "land (and) water, " or "land of

watern to refer, as others might use the term "homeland, n to the space of national

belonging. I draw attention, finally, to the most recent incarnation of Nusantara in

emergent visions of the archipelago as an Islamic political space, and point out how this

rendition of sea space a post-national Southeast Asia, like earlier maritime ideologies, in

proffers an alternative political imaginary.

Why nmaritime ideologies"?

It has oftenbeen said that the seas in Southeast Asia, rather than an obstacle or hindrance, are a unifying factor for the peoples who live along the region's rivers and

coasts (Coedes 1968: 3-4). The seas may also provide a geographical framework for

24 discussing the possibility of region-wide themes (Wolters 1982: 35). Comparing the seas

of Southeast Asia with the Mediterranean, O.W. Wolters pointed out that in Braudel's portrayal, the unity of the Mediterranean was created by t�e movements of people over the sea routes - movements that had much to do with the growth of urban-based trade. In

Southeast Asia, by contrast, maritime communications did not lead to similar permanent

4 and substantial polities (Wolters 1982: 36-37). Wolters reckoned that when we examine the sea's influence on shaping history in Southeast Asia, we do not stumble upon a useful

theme, for in his view, the seas there fit into a polycentric landscape (Wolters 1982: 38). 5

Nevertheless, he went on to suggest another way that the seas had an impact on the region's history, namely, the influencethey exerted on the possibilities fo r an intra- regionalcommunality of historical experience. In connection with this idea, rather than a

Southeast Asian "Mediterranean," Wolters argued instead fo r a "single ocean" stretching from East Africa to South Asia and on to the coasts of China. He viewed this "single ocean" as a "vast zone of neutral water," "with a genuine unity of it's own" (Wolters

1982: 38-9). Althoughhis temporal focus largely predates mine, Wolters' perspective on

Southeast Asian ocean space as partof a "vast zone of neutral water" "with a genuine unityof its own" provides a sharpcontrast with my aims here. The thrust of this chapter is that, on the contrary, Southeast Asian seas have been a symbolic and material resource significantto imperial, national, local, and "ethnic" contexts. Whatever sea-related

"unities" have been made to appear as natural, the seas have hardly comprised a "neutral" medium, but have rather been the terrain, as it were, of contestation.

41n partbecause ofthis, it is safe to say that Wolters did not view the seas of Southeast Asia as a regional analogy for the Mediterranean. Compare Bentley who claims the opposite Bentley (1986). 5 This "polycentric landscape" refers to his well-known metaphorof "mandala" polities.

25 The view of ideologyemployed here does not reduce it to the notion of an

illusion, a mask or fa lse consciousness. Rather, the conception of ideology used here is

primarily concerned with the representation of unities where, if not contestations, social

divisions certainly abound. 6 I am especially interested here in the fo rmulation of apparently legitimate political visions fo r social groupings - for collectivities either explicitly named or simply presupposed - whose internal differences are effaced. These apparently legitimate political visions are, in effect, political imaginaries that use different versions ofthe space of Southeast Asian seas - different seascapes - as their vehicle. Like other political imaginaries groping fo r legitimacy, the maritime ideologies I examine here reach back to the past fo r "names, battle cries and costumes" and project this "time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language" onto claims in the present and fo r possible futures. 7

A history such as the one I suggest here, which looks at ideological fo nns - discourses in which multiple social divisions are effaced - is by no means a substitute fo r studying either the multifarious things that people do, or theirempirical distribution in a production process. This is an importantcaveat. Yet, despite the disorientation that may come from analyzing such decontextualized material, ideological discourse is, fo r all that, a crucial part of the social. Once we recognize that:

ideology operates through language and that language is a medium of social action, we must also acknowledge that ideology is partially constitutive of what, in our societies, is "real." Ideology is not a pale image of the social

6 My use of the tenn "ideology" here is indebted to John B. Thompson and especially his attention to the work of Castoriadis, Lefort, and Bourdieu. Thompson sought to redirect the study of ideology away from the search for collectively shared values, and, as with shifts in the study of"culture," to aim investigation instead at "the complex ways in which meaning is mobilized for the maintenance of relations of domination" (Thompson 1984: 5, 35). 7 The quoted fragments are from Marx (1963: 15).

26 world but is a part of that world, a creativeand constitutive element of our social lives (Thompson 1984: 5-6).

To study ideology, then, is to study, in part, how these creative actions serve to sustain the organization of power in unequal social relations (Thompson 1984: 6). 8

Empires realand imagined

While in this chapter I trace a history of the region's seas as an area that, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, becomes increasingly territorialized, it should at least be mentioned that enormousswaths of ocean were claimed as territory in the sixteenth century. Balboa, for instance, had claimed the entire Pacific fo r the King of Spain in 1513. Although such a claimto the entire ocean "was never legally accepted"

(Buchholz 1987: 2), by the end of the sixteenth century, not only did Spain claim the

Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, but Portugal claimed the Atlantic south of

Morocco as well as the Indian Ocean (Scott 1916: vii).

Certainly theDutch did not accept this. Although technically the Dutch were in revolt against Spain and not atwar with Portugal, both, under the same sovereign, claimed the right to exclude all "foreigners" fromnavigating or enteringthese waters

(Scott 1916: vii). Hugo de Groot's legal treatise Mare Liberum, or Freedom of the Seas,

8 The limitations of space preclude a fullertheoret ical discussion of how ideologies are historically produced and transformed. Such a discusion would take account of, among other things, how discourse is always made, as Bakhtin showed, through "dialogical" movements that refer to prior usages of words, phrases, styles, etc., even as these are reinvented in the concreteness of present circumstances. Yet this materiality ofla nguage use and its dialogical movement give only a glimpse onto wider worlds of structure and practice that also enable discursive meaningto emerge and are in tum invoked through it. The worlds of practice and structure most relevantto the maritime ideologies in thischapter arethose ofgovernance. Above all, the late colonial militaryand adminis trative reorganization of space and its relation to the production of colonial knowledge abouthuman, and especially "native," social differences.

27 composed in 1604-5, argued against the ownership of the high seas, and it did so in the

interests of Dutch trade. The Ma re Liberum was part of a larger work, De Jure Praedae,

9 or The Law of Prize (Hamaker 1868; Scott 1916), which was composed after a decision

by the Dutch Admiralty court to investigate the seizure of the Portuguese vessel, the Sta.

0 Catarina, and to determine what to do with her cargo.1 The Sta. Catarina had been

seized near the mouth of the Johor River and the present-day Straits of Singapore by the

Dutch Admiral Jakob van Heemskerk in 1603 - the year after the fo unding of the Dutch

11 East India Company, or VOC.

Whether the services of Hugo de Groot, or Grotius - a scholar of law, classics,

and a theologian - were sought to provide the strongest possible legal and moral justification for the Dutch action (Scott 1916: vi; Wilson 1984: 7), or rather, in an

apologia, to popularize it (Borschberg 2002: 31, 56), the framework in which Grotius

interpreted this capture was patently not just abouttrade rivalries. It was also about the

United Provinces' revolt against Iberian domination and the extension of this struggle to

the waters of Southeast Asia. That this was an important framework fo r Grotius himself

2 becomes clear if we turnto his poetry. 1

9 Scott translates "praedae" as "prize," but it may be closer to "booty" (personal communication John Blankenship). 10 On the occasion of its composition, see Scott ( 1916: vi) and Wilson ( 1984: 7). Borschberg (2002: 35) indicates that thevesse l, usually referred to as a "carrack" or "galleon" was, judging by descriptions, most likely a sixteenth century Portuguese nao, and would have appeared "colossal" to its Dutch attackers. 1 1 According to Borschberg (2002: 34, note 12), Grotius incorrectly places theincident in the Straits of Malacca. The Sta. Catarina incident should be seen against the background of the Union of Spain and Portugal under Hapsburg rule by 1580, and by 1590, the extension of attacks to Portuguese targets by Spain's avowed enemies - England and the United Provinces. In thiscontext, Stadholder Prince Maurice of Orange instructed Dutch captains under the VOC's predecessors to "defend" themselves against any party that might impede their voyage or inflict harm,and to seek reparations fo r damages suffered (Grotius, De Jure Praedae, p. 376, in Borschberg 2002: 50; butsee also note 15 below). 2 1 That the struggle against Iberian domination is the framework in which to view Grotius' composition of DeJu re'Praedae is also supported by Lauren Benton's work (2003) on the complex and evolving legal regimesof the late sixteenth andearly seventeenth century. In light of her discussion, it is important to view the De Jure Praedae and the roleof Prince Maurice in relation to legal regimes that defined legitimate

28 In a series of elegiacs called the Maurice Epigrams, written fo r Prince Maurice,

Grotius celebrated the exploits of the Dutch army and navy from 1588 to 1609. One of

these poems, a tetratisch called ltinera lndicana, or Exp edition to the East Indies, was

composed in 1602, before the Sta. Catarina was captured. In ltinera Indicana, Grotius

speaks of a fleetthat comes fa r from the Northernsky - or perhaps hemisphere, "a free

people, Batavians by name; sole hope and effort lest both skies know a single master." 13

The Batavians in question were not so much the recent settlers on Java, but the ancient

Batavians, who provided the Dutch with a myth of descent from magnificent ancestors

predating Spanish rule. This myth, re-presented as a historical continuity, served in part

as justification fo r the Dutch Provinces' revolt against Spain. It was, then, within this anti-

imperial framework and the effort to imagine and establish a Dutch polity with a

legitimate sovereign that the Ma re Liberum was articulated, and the events it referred to

would in tum anchor the efforts of the Dutch to expand their own influence in the

region.14

Grotius based his arguments in De Jure Praedae partly on the notion, also

common to the Spanishsources he consulted, that the act of preventing or actively

impeding a party from exercising a right bestowed by nature is in itself a sufficient legal groundupon which to initiate and wage a just war (Borschberg 2002: 56, emphasis

trade as that sponsored by a lawfUl sovereign. Claims such as the De Jure Praedae to rightful prize, as well as seeking reparations for damages would, then, presumably have been a way to gain recognition of Prince Maurice's sovereigntywithin international legal fo ra that judged the legitimacy of such sovereign authorizations. 13 "Sidera sub pedibus positum quae pingitis axem; Haec procul Arctoo classis ab axe venit. Libera gens: nomen Batavi; spes sola /aborque, Unum ne dominum norit uterque polus." Grotius (1670: 276). The poem was located by first line index in Eyffinger(1 982: 94). I gratefully acknowledge the Latin translation assistance provided by John Blankenship. 14 For details on how the Sta. Catarina's seizure led tosuch longer-term developments as: theconsolidation of the Dutch presence in the region, theopen ing of the China and Japan markets to the VOC,the securing of Johor's independence vis-a-vis regional powers, as well as the eviction of Portugal as a maritime and land-based military fo rce from the Straits ofMalacca. I refer the readerto Borschberg (2002)

29 added). Ironically, a notion similar to "the free seas," based less on "natural" than on

arguably more theological grounds, was put fo rward by the ruler of Mak.assar in 1615, in

protest against the Dutch:

God has made the earth and sea, has divided the earth amongmankind and given the sea in common. It is a thing unheard of that anyone should be forbidden to sail the seas ...(Stapel 1922: 14, note 2, in Resink 1968: 45).

In the seventeenth century, the South Sulawesi port ofMak.assar, wh ich had a

large-scale transit trade in spices from the Moluccas to elsewhere, had no choice but to

fight the VOC's efforts to gain a monopoly in the nutmeg and clove trade. In the first half

of the century, military and naval preponderance still lay with Mak.assar, although not

without a struggle, but the balance shifted significantly in the second half of the century.

Objections to the prohibition of trade with Company islands and ports were most clearly

expressed by Sultan Hasanuddin during Dutch negotiations for a treaty to do so in 1659.

Such a prohibition ran counter to the commandment of God, he said,

who created the world in order that all people should have the enjoyment thereof, or do you believe that God has reserved these islands, so fa r away

from the place of your nations, fo r your trade alone .. . ? (Stapel 1922: 62, in Resink 1968: 46).

Within a decade, with the help ofMak.assar's rivals, Ternate and the Bugis realm of Bone,

the Dutch took over the port of Mak.assar, dramatically altering the dynamics of trade and

power in the region.

Despite his mocking, ironic tone, Sultan Hasanuddin's remarks that perhaps the

Dutch thought God had reserved the archipelago for their trade alone sound eerily similar to later colonial visions of empire in the nineteenth century. It was in themid-nineteenth

30 century that the famous Dutch author Multatuli-a Latin nom de plume meaning "I have suffered much" -put forward in his best-known work an archipelagic vision of empire.

Multatuli's novel, Max Ha velaar, decries the treatment of the native Javanese under the yoke of colonialism, and it also bemoans the equivocal position of an official who tries to ameliorate their conditions. This, however, is no anti-colonialist tract. In fa ct, it does not advocate doing away with colonialism at all, but envisions a kind of radical reform. Toward the end of his book, the author-cum-narrator threatens

Deliverance and help, by legal means, ifpossible, by the legitimate means of

force, if necessary. . . This book is only a beginning. I shall wax in power and keenness of weapons, in proportion as shall be necessary. God grantthat it may not be necessary! No! It will not be necessary! For I dedicate my book to You, William the Third, King, Grand Duke, Prince - more than Prince, Grand Duke and King - EMPEROR of the glorious realm ofiNSULINDE, that coils yonder round the Equator like a girdle of emerald.15

Although he was concerned with the suffering of Javanese peasants under colonialism, in seeking a way out of their predicament and his, Multatuli imagined an entire archipelagic realm of which perhaps he himself, or Williamthe Third, would be the rescuer and Emperor. The realm, "Insulinde," a name that he coined by combining insula - "island" andInd(i)�. was the brainchild of a loyal - if critical - imperial subject.

This mythic image of the entire archipelago as a political space prefigured latercolonial andnati onalist spatial imaginings that explicitly included the seas together with the archipelago's islands.

Similar territorial myths of dominion were supported by the work of colonial cartographers who, in the early twentieth century, represented the high seas of Southeast

Asia as "empty space" and the coastlines as part of colonial territory. Maps were used as

15 Multatuli(19 87 [1860]: 320); emphasis and capitalization in the original. I have edited out the original's ellipses which were stylistic rather than indicative of missing phrases.

31 a quasi-legal means to reconstruct the property histories of the new colonial possessions - legitimizing the spread of colonial power (Anderson 1991: 173-6). Such maps thus reworked what were acknowledged to be, in other legal contexts, the coasts of independent native realms.

G.J. Resink worked hard to bring to light these other legal articulations in which native realms were still recognized as independent, and to deflate the territorial myths of extensive colonial control outside of Java before the twentieth century (see also Harvey

1974: 47, note 66). Resink had a keen eye for noting the passing remarks of colonial officials, remarks which show, fo r instance, that the independence of the allied realms and vassal principalities on Celebes was recognized between 1871 and 1881 by courts of every level in the lesser Netherlands East Indies. Yet the Council of the Indies reconsidered this fact of their independence in the 1890's. By the end of the century and fo llowing the "fall" of Aceh a fe w years later, this independence was lost - legally, if not in practice - to a policy that attempted to bring Dutch "political" domination to realms across the archipelago, through the use of "short declaration" (korte vekrlaring) treaties backed by the use of guns. What Resink shows, would like to stress, is that certain lands I in the late nineteenth century, which were considered and were treated by officials as independent realms, still - in the legal sense - had shores that were not washed by the waters of the Netherlands East Indies (Resink 1968: 136-8, 141-2, 165, 182-3). In other words, at the time there had not been a sense of the Netherlands East Indies as a unified territory, least of all one that encompassed the entire archipelago. It is important to bear this in mind, for Multatuli's vision of lnsulinde and the dominance of subsequent maritime ideologies seem to obscure these historical circumstances.

32 FollC?wingthe defeat of realms outside of Java between 1905 and 1915 through

the imposition of short declaration treaties, the waters of the archipelago and what they

contained increasingly became the object of scientific attention, and one could say that

scientific discourse and practice were part of the arsenal by which the Dutch appropriated

these waters. In 1922, with the publication of De Zeeen van Nederlandsch Oost-lndie

(The Seas of the Netherlands East-Indies), one could learn about ocean science by

reading chapters �hat discussed sea depths and soundings, the temperature and salinity of

the water, maritime meteorology and the tides, the biology of the seas, its geology, and

the delineation of coasts - a fe w of which already had lighthouses (Koninklijk

Nederlansch Aardrjkskundig Genootschap 1922). Two sections on the environment

appear in the chapter on biology: De zee als woonruimte (Oikumene) voor dieren -the

sea as an environment fo r animals, and another section on the sea as an environment fo r

plants. One finds here no mention at all of orang /aut or "sea people" - the various people

whose lives were closely associated with the waters. Although the maritime realm was

also their "environment," it was, perhaps, considered inappropriate to study them under

the rubric of scientific discourses about the sea. Yet within discourses of colonial

knowledge produced about "natives," it was also difficult to locate "sea people," who

were dispersed, peripatetic to varying degrees, and claimed no land as collectively theirs

or to which their "origins" might be traced.

Just as colonial mapping did not recognize the presence and practices of upland

shifting agriculturalists, the littoral spaces in which sea people lived and the maritime areas they traversed were likewise viewed as a kind of empty space. This contrasted

markedly with the ways that places - on land - began to index groups of people in

33 colonial knowledge about "natives." Places on land, that is, stood fo r various groups of people in a way that could not be applied to people associated with the seas. The organization of colonial knowledge produced about "native" peoples and their languages, " well-ensconced, by the time of TheSeas of the Netherlands East-Indies, in the Royal

16 Institute for Philology, Ethnography and Geography, followed much the same logic as late colonial administration, which, like military operations, worked largely within a discourse of mapping. 17 "Sea people," apparently lacking a particular place on land from which they might claim to hail as a group, thus occupied a kind of structural blind spot, and a position that marked them, in relation to others, as different in an unusual or peculiar way. Theirmovement on the seas and their perceived lackof a homeland seems to have destined them for a place in the colonial imagination -both British and Dutch - as "sea gypsies." It is through these structures of late colonial administration and the production of knowledge about the archipelago's "natives" that "sea people" begin to appear not to "fit." They appear, in other words, to be out of place with respect to the curious relation between the organization of knowledge about native peoples and the logic of mapping evidentin the structures of late colonial governance. I will come back to this point in the final section below, following a look at how the space of the seas has appeared in different post-independence national settings.

First, though, I wish to returnfor a moment to The Seas of the Netherlands East-

Indies, in order to suggest how it was that the imperial vision of Multatui's Insulinde,

16 Koninklijk lnstituut voor To ol- Land- en Vo/kenkunde, until recentlyknown by the alternate English name: "the Royal Institute ofLinguistics andAnthropo logy." Judging from theback cover of the BKI or Bijdragen van het Koninklijk lnstituut, their periodical, KITLV has recently changed its English name again, for the first 2003 issue appears with the name: the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. 17 On colonial administration and military operations in Southeast Asia serving a discourse of mapping, see Tongchai (I994) and Anderson(19 91).

34 r

"that coils yonder round the . Equator like a girdle of emerald," drew closer to and nearly

converged with the Dutch transposition of the old Javanese term nusantara. The

introductory section of the book offers an historical overview of the research, and here, in

the early historical background, we find that in the opinion of its author, Marco Polo's

travel notes were "not of any oceanographic importance," fo r

the beginnings of our knowledge lie not with Marco Polo. One seeks it (it speaks fo r itself) in the knowledge of the natives themselves. It is the Nagarakertagama (1365) which, through an enumeration of many geographic proper names, demonstrates that the Javanese of the fo urteenth century were acquainted, even though only superficially, with the whole of our "East," from Sumatra including the Malay peninsula to the west coast of New Guinea, and thus, from their own experience, had acquired a certain degree of familiarity with its coasts and principal channels (Naber 1922; emphasis and parenthetical aside in original).

The Javanese, says the author, were acquainted with "the whole of our 'East'."

This "whole of our 'East,' from Sumatra . . . to the west coast ofNew Guinea," no diffe rent

a space, really, from Multatuli's "Insulinde," would, even before independence, become

known as "nusantara," a term borrowed fr om fo urteenth century Javanese texts such as

the Nagarakertagama. In those fo urteenth century texts, however, nusantara did not mean

"archipelago," still less "Dutch empire in the east"; rather, the term was used to refer to

the other islands beyond Java. In the next section, I examine how "nusantara" underwent

various permutations as an emblem of archipelagic political space.

Spaces of nationalist unity

Images of political unity were, to be sure, crucial to the successes of the anti-

colonial movement. Calls fo r anti-colonial national unity had already been clearly voiced

i:

35

.

. l!i. at the Youth Congress in Batavia in 1928, and these calls explicitly included the seas in the space of the nation. The Sumpah Pemuda, or Youth Pledge, ofthe 1928 Congress adopted the ideals of one nation, one language (bahasa Indonesia), and one "homeland."

However, in Indonesian, the term was not really "homeland," "fatherland" or

"motherland," but tanah air, "land (and) water" or even "land of water" - including, of course, the seas, which make up so much of the region as a geographic body.

"Tanah" literally means land or soil, and cognates of this Malay term were widely used in place names. Similar to how the term "-land" is used in Germanic-language place names, these areas, often ill defined, became more carefully demarcated by the late- colonial period (and in some places much earlier), as authorities drew the boundaries of administrative units. This process of establishing administrative territories out of more vaguely defined "lands" was described to me once by an anthropologist early in my studies. Pausing in her description of the process, she asked me about the "Bajo" -the name by which Sarna sea people in the archipelago are usually known to others. Like the lana Bali of the Balinese and the tana Ja wa of the Javanese, don't, she wondered aloud, the Bajo have a tanah too? Yet there is, as I told her, no such place. 18 All such "tana(h)" places are by definition on land, whereas the Bajo or Sarna, associated with the sea, have no ideologically primordial attachment to particular bits of land as the place they "come

from." Tanah air - the land(and) water, or land of water, has, fo r its part, a specifically nationalist referent and is not marked as the place of any particular sub-group.19

111 None, except for "Bajoe" which in the Bugis language ofSouth Sulawesi means "the Bajo," a name appliedto the site of a Bajo settlement thatwas closest to the Bugis realm of Bone. Similarly, there is a "Labuanh�Uo" or "Bajo Harbour." But neitherof theseplaces is pointed to by Bajo people as the collective locus of mythic origins. Some loci of mythicprovenance exist, yet they apply only to elites, are not widely known, very between different versions of similar stories, and arenot regarded as places of collective "origin" except, perhaps, by a very few. 19 It has carried this nationalist ·sense in Malaysian usage as well.

36 "Nusantara," since at least the mid-twentieth century, has basically served as a

synonym fo r tanah air. Usually translated as "the Archipelago," the term, as mentioned above, can be traced to fo urteenth century Javanese texts where it meant not

20 "archipelago," but "the other islands" - as seen from Majapahit Java. In colonial (and later) scholarship, the rather exaggerated reach of a Majapahit "empire" served both

Javanese pretensions as well as those of the Dutch who claimed to want to restore the luster of the glorious "lndianized" states of Java's pre-Islamic past.

While these colonial connotations of an authentic Javanese imperial past persisted, modem usages of the word nusantara denote a national space in which the

Javanese frame of reference has largely fa llen away. Since the mid-1 940's nusantara has stood fo r the whole archipelago, not just some parts of it in the eyes of others, and contemporary Indonesians of all stripes give it a believable, if mistaken, fo lk etymology.

The fo lk etymologyderivation works as fo llows: nusa, fam iliar to Indonesians who encounter it in the place names fo r particular islands and island chains, is Javanese fo r

"island"; antara, in modem Indonesian, means "between." Most Indonesians nowadays are happy to explain that the term nusantara therefore refers to the islands between the

Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean (or the China Sea), or the islands between the Asian mainland and Australia.

Vlekke used the term in his book, Nusantara: A History of the East Indian

Archipelago, published in English in 1943. He was the first to see that the history of

"Indonesia" -aterm already in scholarly use fo r a century - had begun to vacillate between a colonial history of the Netherlands East Indies and a national history of

20 Prapanca (1995: 82, canto 79.3; 85, canto 83.5); Colon Arang (1926: 136) cited in Gonda (1956: 402); Zoetmulder (1982). In addition, I later founddoing after the research on this material that Resink (1968: 21-22) himself had made the same point. He cites Berg (1951: 512 n. 1 1) as his source.

37 ------· ------

21 Indonesia (Resink 1968: 18). The 1943 edition was reprinted in 1977, but in revised versions from 1959 and 1960 the title was indeed changed to Nusantara: A History of

Indonesia. The change in title reflected the occurrence of the anti-colonial revolution fo llowing the end of World War ll.

In connection with the final suppression of multiple rebellions against the central government after Indonesia's revolution, nusantara was again reinvented. As the revolution's army of "irregulars" was disbanded, the emerging professional army basically reconquered, during the 1950's, much of the territory that had only been brought under the colonial state's sway (and this to varying degrees) in the early twentieth

22 century. 1n attempts to bring these "regional rebellions" to a close, in 1957 the central government issued a statement of national unity called the Dj uanda Declaration. This

Declaration asserted national territorial unity on the basis of what was ostensibly bequeathed by the former colonial power. It differed, however, fromearlier, colonial visions of territory by having not just a narrowstrip of coastal zone around each of the islands, but included insteadall of the waters between Indonesia's many islands within a single body. It was the creation of what the historian Thongchai Winichakul has called a national "geo-body," an abstract geographical signifierthat was a model/or, rather than a

23 model of, what it purported to represent (Thongchai 1994: 130).

This new geo-body called "Nusantara" - a territorial space that included all of the intra-island waters - was meant to stand for "Indonesia" Implicitly, it referred back to the

21 Resink (1968: 18) also noted that Vlekke owed the title to Ki Hadjar Dewantoro. 22 These "regional rebellions" took place, fo r the most part, in areas which the Dutch had called "the Outer Islands" - ratherre miniscent of the fo urteenth centuryJava- centric sense of nusantara. 23 In a piece that first appeared in 1952, Res ink remarked upon preciselythis sort of fo rward-looking impetus in historiography. Wbile Resink'seyes dwelt on the page of colonial history, the gazeof Annijn Pane - an author who traveled thepath from literature to historyand whowrote about thepr ecolonial past - skippedover the that page entirely,wandering to the still-unwrittennational history(Resink 1968: 25).

38 earlier nationalist fo rmulation of tanah air, while it simultaneously invoked a supposedly

imperial Javanese past. In this way, a notion of the pre-colonial past was used to

underwrite a presumptionof Javanese supremacy with a pseudo-historical legitimacy.24 It

should not be fo rgotten that the Dj uanda Declaration's particularreinvention of nusantara

was not simply intended to buttress national unity, but rather was quite explicitly.used to justifymeasures taken against "rebellions" in "the regions" in the name of "national

security."

Heavily promoted as a national ideology since 1973,25 the "Nusantara Concept"

(Wawasan Nusantara) gained even further legitimacy with Indonesia's participation in

the third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which lasted

from 1973 to 1982. Inthis third UNCLOS,the Dj uanda geo-body ofNusantara gained an

Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), a 200 nautical mile swath around an imaginary line connecting the outermost points of all the islands. Like the colonial use of maps in an earliertime, the new nusantara borders reconfigured a property history. In this international context of legal discourses, the Nusantara Concept was used to justify state ownership of all material resources within and below the waters between the archipelago's islandsas well as within the EEZ.26

The major concerns of most nations involved in UNCLOS were both strategic and material. Strategic concerns, for instance, included rights of passage through certain waterways, and material concerns focused especiallyon deep-seabed minerals and

24 This was, in fo nn, not so unlike Grotius invoking, "a free people, Batavians by name ..." This poetic reference was, if you recall, a myth of glorious ancestors set out asa proposition of historical continuity. Used against Iberian imperial domination, it also projected the image of a Dutch collectivity into the future: "sole hope, lest both skies know a single master." 25 The same year, as it happens,that oil prices shot up, and during which what was left of political parties in Indonesia were fused into two groups barred from organizing below the district level. 26 As a "logo," however, the other "avatar" of the map discussed by Anderson ( 1991) -a sort of "pure sign" of a political space - the amorphous nusantara shape left a bit to be desired.

39 ownership of sub-seafloorhydrocarbon resources. These resources aremuch more

lucrative and less mobile than the sea's dwindling biological resources which, adversely

affected by illegal and unsustainable commercial fishing, have since raisedthe stakes on

the struggle fo r survival among Indonesia's coastal populations, including "sea people."

For the governmentof Indonesia and the other states involved in UNCLOS, however,

fishwere small fry compared to strategic interests, hydrocarbons and the potential of

exploiting deep-seabed minerals. Such material interests underlie ongoing disputes over \ the ownership of particular small islands, such as Sipadan, and the EEZ's that would be

extended by sovereignty over them. 27

Similarly, with the disappearance of East Timor fromthe Nusantara geo-body,

Indonesia hadfe w legal grounds to contest the loss of the resource-rich Timor Gap. Yet

small islands like Sipadan present another sort of problem. One of the factors in deciding territorial disputes over such islands is the question of whether theysupport a "permanent

settled population." This question links territorial claims to the issue of permanent settlement. However, like colonial mapping and other discourses that link notions of property to settled occupation, this criterion does not recognize the fact that historically,

"sea people" have lived on, and sometimes moved offof , the small islands like Sipadan that dot the waters offthe coast of eastern Malaysia andelsewhere in the region.

27 Sipadan, from which 21 people were taken on 23 April 2000 by Abu Sayyaf "rebels," was reported in most mediaas "a Malaysian resort island." It had, however, been under dispute between Indonesia and Malaysia since 1969, and by mutual agreement was submitted to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 1997. The ICJ decidedon 17 December2002 that Sipadan and Ligitan islands belongto Malaysia (Media Indonesia, 18 December 2002). Overlapping claims to islands and the EEZ's they would extend areperhaps denser in the South China Seathan anywhere else in the world. While Indonesia is not a primary party to the complex Spratly Islandsdispute, China's claims do overlap the areathat Indonesia claims around Natuna and its associated gas fields.

40 Anomalous ethnicityand the new nusantara

Perhaps nothing in Indonesia better illustrates the use of place as an icon of

"identity" than Taman Mini - the Mini Theme Park of the high Suharto era that John

Pemberton writes about so revealingly in On the Subject of 'Ja va '. He describes how the

park presents emblems of "cultural" difference from various parts of the archipelago to

people fo r their self-recognition as Indonesian subjects. Such emblems of difference

included, among other things, styles of dress and architecture. The park's piece de

resistance, however, is the pond, which contains the archipelago in miniature. Through it,

people are meant to read isometric relations between the particular places, and the

presumably distinct peoples, of Indonesia. Of course, "sea people" are nowhere to be

fo und in such a scheme, fo r there is no place in the pond that represents fo r them, what is,

fo r others, a notion of "their land." While on the one hand, the miniature archipelago in the pond iconically manifests the national motto "Unity in Diversity," on the other hand,

the bounded pond taken as a whole is an iconic representation, not just of the space of the

. 8 nation, but of the EEl-expanded Nusantara. 2

When one fo cuses on the ideological structures of ethnic diffe rence and how these are produced in relation to discourses about national subjects, one gets a remarkably flat picture that irons out the complexity of social differences and hierarchies. Yet it is against precisely this structure of apparently equivalent differences that sea people appear as a

9 kind of ethnic anomaly.2 Romanticized in the colonial period as "sea gypsies," one gets the impression from this char�terization that most "sea people" were always on the move

28 In this, it is another example of the Indonesian nation's geo-body - using Tongchai's ( 1994) term.On Taman Mini, see Pemberton (1994); also see Patricia Spyer (1996) on "diversity" in Suharto's New Order. 29 One can make a similar case fo r Roma, especially in Europe and the fo rmer Soviet Union.

41 or about to be. This romanticized image facilitates the sense thatsea people, under the

present rubric of "formerly nomadic," no longer move anywhere at all. While there has

been, over roughly the past century, a great deal of settlement both by choice and by 30 government policy, just as sea people were not itinerant in line with the romantic

colonial image of them, it is also clearlynot the case that sea people no longer get around

nautically. Nonetheless, viewed as "sea gypsies" who are now only "formerly nomadic,''

they are widely consideredto have lost their "authenticity."

Sarnaand other "sea people" in Indonesia have, moreover, been relentlessly

subjected to primitivizing discourses, which cast them as the inverse of the "modem" and

the "developed." In the Suharto period they were administratively classed with

masyarakat terasing - "isolated peoples," or suku-suku terasing - "isolated tribes."

"Terasing," here, has two meanings and there is slippage between them: secluded,

separate, isolated on the one hand and very fo reign or exotic on the other. What "sea

people" have often been isolated from,however, arenot other people and places- they

have after all been involved in some degree of travel and trade - rather they have become

isolated in relation to administrative structures and their centers.

Yet, it is also not simply the case that administrative centers are so physically

distant. Small islandsand coastal settlements often mustbe reachedby boat, and civil

servants consider them out-of-the-way. However, even when the way is clearand not so far,. officialsare often reluctant to get into boats they consider riskywith people they sometimes call ''primitif." In addition, and importantly, for"sea people," their apparent

"lack" of an ideologically primordial identification with a particularplace on land has

30 I say thisbased on over eighteen months of fieldwork between 1994 and 2000, including dozens of interviews with elderly Sama people in the Sulawesi region; yet there is other evidence fo r it as well, such Warren's (1971) Masters thesis.

42 prevented them from fonningthe kinds of ethnic patronage networks that are supported

by territorial administrative structures. In part because they do not have access to such

networks, even when Sarnapeople do, for instance, rise in the bureaucracy, they may

shed their ethnic markedness (as "Sarna") and "disappear" to would-be clients. Not only

in tenns of physical infrastructure then, but also fo r structural-ideological reasons, many

Sarna "sea people" have become administratively marginal, persisting, in a sense, on the

31 edges of govemance.

This, at any rate, is how things seem from the outside looking in, and from the top

looking down. This chapter, then, as delineated earlier, attempts to outline a history of

ideological fonns- discourses in which multiple social divisions are effaced - and that

this approach is by no means a substitute for examining the many things people do and

32 say, or their place in processes ofproduction. Here I simply tryto show how the space

of the seas have been a crucial part ofpolitical imaginaries at different historical moments in Southeast Asia and particularly inIndon esia. As part of regional political

imaginaries, sea space became increasinglyterrit orialized, while at the same time, people of the littoral came to be viewed as more, or perhaps less, than just anotherethnic group.

Romanticized as "sea gypsies," their putative origins as a group not traced to any particular land, "sea people" elude the impetus to fo und ethnic "identity" or historical

"origin" on place. Like "gypsies" elsewhere, they reveal a dominant structure of

31 As I explain at various points in the dissertation, their position at the·edges of governance is more than an issue of either geographic or administrative structure, and must be seen as a social location structured not only by exclusions but engagement in particular sorts of practices. Finding themselves in this position, there is a certain craft- interpretive and practical- involved in taking advantage of it in order to survive materially and socially. I gratefully acknowledge the phrase "edges of governance" as a gift from Kathleen Canning, who used it to describe part of what I was getting at in an early draft of chapter six. 32 This examination of maritime ideologies andwhat it means to be on the edges of governance is, then, analytic historical background to the wider project on Sama people in eastern Indonesia's littoral, as well as a necessary introduction to a view of the region's seas as "territory" in contrast to the ways in which livelihood practices, kin networks, narratives andheirloom objects fo llow coasts and cross the waters.

43 equivalent ethnic oppositions through their implicit placement outside of it - a kind of

anomaly to that structure - despite increasingly territorialized seas.

The UNCLOS-inspired Nusantara was the height of attempts to use this term to

represent a precisely delimited Indonesian territorial unity. After Suharto's fall in 1998, the "regions" began to call for decentralization. Coupled with a referendum in East Timor that led to its independence, and violent conflicts in a number of areas, fears mounted that

Indonesia might disintegrate. In February 2000, these fears were serious enough for the

33 United States to publicly affirm its backing of Indonesia's territorial integrity.

Other sorts of material developments on which I have not focused will also affect the state of the seas and coasts as well as the lives of people in the littoral: for instance, the proposed installation of a Kuwaiti oil refinery in South Sulawesi, or, if environmental

34 concerns take precedence there, then somewhere else; and the parceling of the territorial

35 sea by fishing conglomerates in cahoots with officials, a practice that follows the sectioning of EEZ's into lots fo r offshore oil exploration rights.These examples illustrate important material issues that are bound to affect the littoral and those who live there.

Instead of focusing on such material details, I have sketched here a broad sequence of maritime ideologies, rather like a rock skipping over thesurface of history's deeper currents. More than simply a sequence, however, I have tried to show how these maritime .

33 "U.S. Backs Indonesian Territorial Integrity," Th e Jakarta Post, February 18, 2000, p.2. The U.S. stated that it did not support other independence movements thatsought to break away from there public after East Timor. Around the same time, there wasa resurgence of an old term from the 1950's: "NKRI" ­ Negara Kesatuan Republic Indonesia, literallythe "United State of the Republic oflndonesia," but the sense of it is more like "unity" or "unified," fo r the root, satu, means "one." The discursivereappearance of "NKRJ" is clearlytied to anxieties of disunity. 34 "Menlu akanbi carakan dengan Kuwait - Soal Investasi Pengilangan Minyak di Selayar," Faj ar, March 8, 2000, p.1. 35 "Parceling"comes from the Indonesian, dikapling, where the root kapling {Dutch: kaveling) means "lot." "Kapal Asingitu Bak Raja Laut," Kompas, February 23, 2000,p.20. The daily Kompas ran a series of articles around this time on the difficultiesfacing fisherpeop le, especially along the north Javacoast.

44 ideologies reach back to "the past" and then use that "past" topro ject a design fr om the political present into the future.

The latest incarnation of Nusantara, fo r example, appears amidst concerns over

Islamic radicalism in the region. In early 2002, police authorities in Singapore claimed to have evidence that Je maah Is lamiyah was a movement dedicated to establishing a vast

Islamic state embracing Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. 36 One individual held under the Internal Security Act in Malaysia is accused, among other things, of working to establish a "NusantaraIslamic State" (Daulah Islamiah Nusantara). As the International

Crisis Group has noted, Malaysian and Singaporean authorities have made much out of calls to establish an Islamic state as evidence of possible links to al-Qaeda. But calls like this have become such a common theme among militant groups in Indonesia, that, indeed, it is hard to see how, by itself, such a call would indicate much of anything (ICG

(2002: 3, 18). By itself it does not indicate much. However, taken together with the other maritime ideologies sketched here, in which the space of the sea fo nns an important resource in the production of powerful political imaginaries, this example illustrates a refonnulationthat draws on earlier similar tenns, butturns them toward a new agenda. In this, it is much like Insulinde, tanah air, and earlier versions of nusantara, taking a "time- honored guise andthis borrowed language .. and projecting them onto a new political project and possible futures.

36 Singapore government pressrelease, II. January 2002, Th e Straits Times, 12-26 January 2002, cited in ICG 2002.

45 Chapter 3

The decline of small-scale ii Shing and the reorganization of livelihood practices

This chapter describes how recent scarcities in Southeast Sulawesi's coastal and marine environments and changes in the region's fisheries and coastal produce industries have impacted the livelihood options of Sarna people. Like other orang /aut or "sea people" in the region, they have customarily drawnon the sea as their main source of subsistence. Sarna people fascinated colonial observers who referred to them as "sea nomads," or "sea gypsies," highly mobile people that made a living through diverse economic practices on the seas and coasts. Often viewed nowadays as "formerly nomadic," it is not, however, simply that theywere once mobile and have been increasingly subject to sedentarizing pressures - although the trope of ever-dwindling nomadism has dominated the literature on Sarna people. Rather, as land-oriented administrative structures grew around them and as other descent groups dominated the networks and privileges linked to their centers, Sarna people developed strategies of living on the edges of governance. Despitethe characterization of them as "formerly nomadic" and the trope of ever-increasing sedentarism, as will become clear below, some older practices of mobility persist and new ones have arisen alongside them.

Economically, Southeast Asian sea people have for centuries played therole of the initial extractors of maritime produce in chains of trade that extended from scattered

46 locales to regional collection points and beyond to China. In recent decades, however,

many of the resources they have relied on fo r their subsistence and trade have dwindled.

This scarcity appears to be due in large part to the dramatic capital intensification of

fisheries and related industries. Greater scarcities of fish, as well as the increased use of

capital-intensive methods of fishing in Southeast Asia, have resulted in the economic

marginalization of small-scale and "artisanal" fishers. With their continued residence

along the country's shores, one effect of this marginalization is the creation of a surplus

labor pool, much of it fe male, available to emerging industries that extract and process

37 the produce of the seas and coasts. Female wage labor in such industries is a new fo rm

of the gendered division of labor in "rural" coastal communities and contributes to a trend

in which fe wer Sarna women spend time in boats on the water or collecting in the tidal

zone. For many of those Southeast Asian "sea people" who continue to fish and to collect

in the tidal zone, changes in the relations of production make their labor appear

autonomous, yet, as one might find with piece-work in the manufacture of clothing, it has

become more directly tied into the global fisheries economy. The marginalization of

small-scale fishers and these shifts in the relations of production, when combined with the dispersed character of Sarna communities in particular, raise poignant questions about the possibilities of Sarna social reproduction.

Similar concerns about livelihood and social reproduction in the face of fisheries crisis made headline news in Europe not long ago. Fears of a collapse in northern

Europe's cod fishery and drastic new quotas set by politicians to restrict the catch of this

37 This situation contrasts, fo r example, with the fisheries industry in France, where state regulation of the labor pool takes place through educational certification programs, as well as through early retirement. These methods inhibit the development of a large surplus labor pool, where one might otherwise expect it as a result of capital intensification and fish scarcities (Menzies 2003).

47 and other species caused angerand dismay throughout Europe's fishingcommunit ies.

The decision by politiciansto impose stricter catch quotas was based on scientific

assessments of the decline in fish stocks, yet few serious measures were proposed to

offset the losses that fishingcommuni ties would certainly suffe r under the new limits.

Such efforts to save the fish stocks while effectively spuming the fishermen prompted the

latter to organize large-scale protests, blocking ports and major shipping channels. These

fisherpeople, questioning the scientific bases and the priorities of such policy decisions,

and frustrated withtheir inability to influence them, realistically fe ared losing not only

their livelihood, but also a way of life with more than merely material significance. 38

Recent events in the fisheries ofnorthern Europe, like the. events I describe in

Sulawesi, illustrate larger dynamics of capital intensification and concentration at work in

the fisheries industry globally (McGoodwin 1990). As small-scale fishers fa ce increased

political-economic marginalization, they are often fo rced into other endeavors. In

Southeast Sulawesi, these pursuits include outmigration to urban settings both in

Indonesia and elsewhere, greater reliance on the saleable extraction of other coastal

resources, and participation as laborers inthe more or less industrialized sectors of

cultivating and processing coastal and maritime produce.

In the initial sections of this chapter, I consider the major economic niches to which Sarna people have shifted, including seaweed cultivation, shipping, and the

increased extraction of mangroves as well as highly valuable species such as shark fin and turtles. I askhow changes in the environment and these shifts in economic practices

38 See the series ofBBC articles in the list of references. The Luddites, who faced a transition from production organized through Trades to one dominated by industrial capitalism, similarly protested not simply technological impositions but the new relationsof production that threatened both their livelihood and their rank and position in society (Thompson 1963: 52 1 -602).

48 have affected their abilityto sustain what are recognized by Sarnapeople as well­

established patterns and methods of making a living. In the latter sections I look at the

effects of these changes, especially on women's economic participation and their

involvement as wage laborers in new productive relations. In particular, I emphasize how

both the organization of their labor, and that of people who continue to engage in some

older livelihood practices, articulate with larger, spatially flexible political-economic

structures. Within a broader theoretical frame, I also consider how some of the issues

raised by studies of agrarian transformations play out in Southeast Asia's liquid territory,

and reflect on how social transformation there may affect the future shapes of Sarna

social reproduction.

Extraction and the role of Ta ngan perlama

Sarnaand other so-called sea-people have long played the role of Iangan perlama,

literally "first hand," in the martime goods trade of island Southeast Asia. Also translated

as "instigator," and in legal discourse as "first owner," in this case, Iangan perlama means

something more akin to "initial extractor." It applies to those who harvest the fruits of

uncultivated yields, those who make the firstextractive step that precedes a series of

exchanges in which goods change hands multiple times. It is in effect through the agency

of Iangan pertama that such goods from the environment are turned into commodities. I

first heard a Sarna person use the phrase Iangan perlama in a description of how

. governmentofficials assigned blame fo r coastal environmental degredation and fish

S'?arcity to the initial extractors. The speaker, an elderly Sarna man who had once been a

49 village head, described in some detail the environmental changes he had witnessed in the

near shore waters over his lifetime. 39

In contrast to the assumptions of officials, fo r whom Sarna were the targets of

educational campaigns and posters about coastal ecology and conservation, this elderly

man stressed that other factors and other people had also contributed to these

environmental changes. On the one hand, people who were not known as "sea people,"

yet who had recently begun to engage in small-scale fishing, also sometimes engaged in

practices which clearly took a toll on coral reefs, including the use of fish bombs and

poisons. On the other hand, he attributed much of the environmental change in the near

shore waters to an expansion in the scale of extraction, a scale of extraction that requires

greater capital investment in boats and equipment than most Sarna people could muster.

The most rapacious example of extraction he depicted was, not suprisingly, the

indiscriminate maw of a trawler. Yet, while trawlers caused the most obvious damage, he

also mentioned other less sensational methods of large-scale extraction.

He pointed out that many of these large-scale methods were basically expanded

versions of fishing techniques that had long been used among Sarna people. But whereas

methods used in large-scale extraction were widely associated with the "modem," Sarna

fa miliarity with their smaller-scale versions was in general perceived not merely as a

difference of scale, but ofkind. Thus the small scale of most Sarnafishing contributed to

views of Sarnapeople as "undeveloped" or "leftbehind "- as fundamentally not modem.

However, by pointing out the similarity in these methods, and differentiating method

from scale, this man re-valued Sarna knowledge to be on a par with "modem" methods and undermined the basis fo r viewing large-scale methods as qualitatively different.

39 Excerpts ofthis interviewappear in Gaynor 1995a and 1995b.

50 Moreover, by emphasizing the role of the scale of extraction both in environmental

degredation and in fish scarcity, and by relativizing the part played therein by Sarna

people, yet elevating the worth of their knowledge, he offered what was essentially a

locally relevant critique of the impact of "development" and development discourse

(Gaynor 1995a, 1995b).

A narrow view of the role of small-scale fishers as Iangan perlama, such as he

implied officials held, a view that portrayed them as responsible fo r over-extraction and

therefore the logical point of conservation-oriented intervention, grossly oversimplified

the interface of the environment with political economy, and also the causes of fish

scarcity. It can even be argued that in some cases this narrow view of Iangan perlama

inverts the relations between the causes and effects of fish scarcity. For instance,

officials, environmental advocates and coral reef ecologists, accustomed to viewing any

extraction of mangroves from the coastal zone as detrimental to fish populations, frown

40 upon the fe lling and processing of mangrove trees into saleable firewood. The selection

of appropriate trees, the un-mechanized manual labor of fe lling them, and the hard work

of debarking and chopping logs into kindling fo r sale in towns and cities, may well cause an incremental depletion of mangrove stands. However, the rate of extraction ofthis process pales in comparison to, fo r instance, the clear-cutting that accompanies the

41 creation of shrimp-ponds.

40 Extensive mangrove depletion does adversely affect fishpopulations because the juveniles of many fish species live in the waters of the mangroves. This is not new infonnation, nor are the attitudes that reasonably and often accompany it. As I learned while a student and researcher of coral reef ecology at Fairleigh Dickinson University's West Indies Laboratory in the late 1980's, the potential impact on juvenile fishpopulations is a major reason why conservation-oriented scientists generally frown on damage to the mangroves, be it via extraction or pollution. For a critical view of local mangrove management in the Philippines see Walters (2004). 41 Shrimp ponds have only recently begun to appear in Southeast Sulawesi and, if if their construction progresses at all, it promises primarily to benefit investors from outside the locale. On the impact of shrimp

51 The reasonwhy some Sarnapeople tum to the mangroves as Iangan pertama to 42 support themselves is thatother options have been exhausted. It is, of course, no surprisethat Sarna people extract a variety of resources from the coastal environment.

The mere fact of extraction only becomes analytically significantwhen one examines the broader political-economic contexts in which it takes place. Particularly since the fe lling of mangrovetrees fo r sale as firewood is a livelihood option of last resort,an alysis of this situation is incomplete without stepping back to askwhy anyone would do this for a living and under what circumstances. One fm ds, on doing so, that the conditions under which small-scale fisherpeople such as Sarna eke out a living are often so poor - in part because there are so few fish - that they then tum to the extraction of other resources such as mangroves, andto other formsof labor less relianton subsistence strategies. This is not simply a matter of choice. As the fo rmervilla ge head asserted, Sarna people do not tum to back-breaking pursuits like this with such low remuneration because they want to, but as a result of economic compulsion (Gaynor 1995b).

Fisher-farmers

In contrastto harvestingthe sea's dwindling uncultivated yields, a fe w coastal

Sarna during the 1990's tried their hand at becoming farmers. They became farmers neither of the soil nor of fish, but rather of a particular kind of seaweed, agar-agar

fanning in Indonesia, see, inter alia, "Shrimp Business Destroys Mangroves and Livelihoods." Down to Earth No. 58 (August 2003); Hall (2003); Bailey (1988c). 42 Similarly, in the 1950's Samapeop le who fledintennittent armedconflict in the Straits ofTiworo fo r the safer town of Raha fo und there were no jobs to behad there, so they moved on to the provincial capital, Kendari, wherethey eventually were employed "gettingwood" from the mangroves. Fieldnotes, 30 March 2000, Mbo' Dahing, Mbo' Masiya, at Pulo Tasippi, Tiworo Straits. Mbo' is Sama for "grandparent" and is also a term of addressfo r elderly people.

52 (Gelidium spp. and Gracilaria spp.). A stabilizing, thickening and gelling agent, agar-agar

is used mostly in the fo od industry in sweetened jellies, sauces and fillings, yet it also has

a variety of pharmaceutical applications and is used as a culture medium in the

biotechnology industry. Agar-agar cultivation began in Indonesia in the mid-1980's. In

1990, export of seaweed from Indonesia was over 10 million kilograms. By 1995 it had

reached a high of over 28 million kilograms, fa lling offto just under 4.5 million

43 kilograms in 1998, the year after the economic crisis. In Tiworo, where seaweed

cultivation appeared to be well-established but relatively small scale, "thousands of tons

piled up in the fishermen's storehouses" when the price plummeted in 2001 from 1,000 to

44 100 rupiah per kilogram. There is, then, a market fo r agar-agar, albeit one that

fluctuates. In addition to an unpredictable market, agar-agar cultivation is beset by a

number of other difficulties. From the growers' point of view, it can be hard - especially

fo r those in out-of-the-way places - to connect with potential buyers. Sometimes growers

lack access to good information about which varieties are relatively more valuable, or

about successful techniques for cultivation. Another difficulty is that in raising agar-agar,

a variety of factors - substrate, salinity, and the dynamics of water movement - all affect

whether and how well it grows. Where it does grow, agar-agar cultivation sometimes raises questions about who owns, has access to, or allocates access to the places with

suitable growing conditions.

43 Source: Statiktik Perdagangan Luar Negeri Indonesia, Ekspor, Biro Pusat Statistik Dikumpulkan dari Buku Tahun 1990- 1998, in "Aspek produksi - Rumput Laut,"http://www.bi.go.id/sipukllm/ind/rumput_ Laut /produksi.htm, downloaded 13 October 2003. Strictly speaking, these figures are for "rumput /aut," the bulk of which is agar-agar, but also includes other seaweeds, primarily carageenan. 44 "Ribuan Ton Rumput Laut Ditimbun." Jawa Pos, February 20, 200 I. The scale of accumulation may have been exaggerated fo r the media. Except fo r one man I know who was born there, it is almost unknown fo r journaliststo go to Tiworo.

53 The term used to characterize those who engage in agar-agar cultivation is "petani

nelayan" or "fisher-fanners." Where exactly the term originates is unclear, but its use is

widespread. "Petani-nelayan" links fisherpeople who engage in agar-agar cultivation to the country's fanners, and through this association they are also connected to a particular image of the Indonesian peasantry. The image I am referring to is that of Ma rhaen.

Sukamo intended for the image of Marhaen to stand for all the nation's poor masses, who, strictly speaking, could not be called proletariats because they did not sell their labor and owned their means of production. This included agricultural peasants as well as poor stall vendors and poor fishermen,and, in his view, extended to poor workers, poor clerks, low-ranking policemen and the children of the troops of the formerIndies army( 1970

[1957]: 156-7, 160). In telling the storyof how he came upon this term, however, he offers an extended description of an agricultural peasant named Marhaen, a "chicken flea farmer" (1970 [1957]: 156-7, 160), who, but for Sukamo's insistence on pauperization as a consequence of Dutch imperialist capitalism, nonetheless closely resembles conventional views of Javanese agricultural peasants, from Du Bus in the early nineteenth centuryto Geertz in the twentieth (Htisken and White 1989: 259). The

Javanese Marhaen became an idealized nationalist symbol of the Indonesian everyman, in particular the poor masses. And while this idealization of a basically classless agricultural peasant has existed in fact only as a minority and may well have obscured the realities of the system of agricultural production (Hfisken and White 1989: 259), the point here is that calling fishers who cultivate agar-agar "fisher-farmers" associates them with a field of discourse about agriculture in which their labor is not denigrated but rather is dignified, even if unintentionally. This in tumunderscores the remarkable fact that,

54 despite Sukarno•s inclusion of fishermen among the nation•s myriad poor, in a country

that is overwhelmingly archipelagic, there have never been any comparably laudable

images of fishers like that of the fa rmer Marhaen.

Widely-circulating ideal images of Indonesian agricultural peasants are also

connected to these nfisher-farmers" in another way. There is a similarity between how

fisher-farmers are viewed by contemporary entrepreneurs and how peasants were

described in colonial economic theory. Colonial accounts of economic 11dualism11 pointed

out that agricultural peasants were excluded from the capitalist economy and were thrown

back on their own resources. Exacerbated by population expansion, peasants, particularly

on Java, were fo rced to divide limited arable and then marginal lands among ever greater

numbers offa rmers (Boeke 1953). Geertz, in his AgriculturalIn volution (1963), offered an explanation of the response to the situation described by colonial economic theory. He

argued that peasants used increasingly intensive methods of agricultural production to reap greater outputs from smaller plots. These same methods would have come into play during periods of contraction in the export-oriented capitalist economy, to reabsorb agricultural laborers from plantations into the peasant economy. It may, in fact, be more accurate to say that there was one economy, and that by absorbing the reserve labor pool, the peasant sector in effect subsidized the plantation sector. In this system, colonial plantation managers had few responsibilities to laborers, who, it appeared, could flow in and out of the plantations, available as needed, and when they were not, they could largely be disregarded. In contemporary entrepreneurial schemes, fisher-farmers are viewed in a similar way.

55 This view is epitomized in "PIR" - ''polainti rakyat," literally the "nucleus-

people pattern," but often termedthe "nucleus-smallholder scheme. "45 Initially conceived

fo r agricultural development projects, PIR reappears with great regularity in all sorts of

entrepreneurial attempts, aimed, at least in part, at helping poor people, including fisher-

farmers. PIR essentially defines production through the metaphor of a cell. The means of

production are called the "inti" or "nucleus," and the labor fo rce is called the ''plasma." In

this metaphor, plasma is the fluid living matter, and the nucleus is the driving fo rce, the

"manager" as it were, of the cell. The metaphor has an uncanny way of disallowing the

capacity of laborers to organize themselves. Furthermore, the inti - associated with the

company, which is to say with capital, its owners, and managers, appears to bear no

social obligations to its workers.

The inti-plasma model supposedly benefits the small-scale grower/harvester - such as the fisher-farmer- by cutting out the middleman, thereby assisting in the transfer of goods to processing facilities and helping laborers avoid a common source of debt. It is

clear, however, that even where the grower/harvesters are organized into cooperatives, the labor fo rce or ''plasma" may still be subordinated to the manager or "inti. "46 As fo r the benefitsreceived by the inti - that is, their savings or profits - these arerarely emphasized within the framework of promoting development projects intended to benefit either agricultural farmers or fisher-farmers. Perhaps this is part of why these schemes sometimes appeal to coastal people whose livelihood options have been limited by the

45 Zemer (2003: 58, 99 note 2) mentions the PIR ("nucleus-plasma") approach among Mandar fishers in Indonesia; earlier publications discuss changes in the Mandar raft fisheryduring the 1970's and 1980's (Zemer 1991, 1997). 46 See fo r instance the warningsand advice ofthe fo mter Head of the Indonesian Board of Cooperatives, Sri-Edi Swasono, "Menyongsong Hari Koperasi 12 July 2002: Koperasi Menjawab Tantangan Jamannya," Pikiran Rakyat, July 12, 2002; http://www.pikiran-rakyat.com/cetak/0702/12/080I.htm, downloaded 30 January 2003.

56 degredation of their resource base and by marginalization in the fisheriesindustry. The

shortcomings of the inti-plasma model notwithstanding, the price offered fo r seaweed

varies dramatically and the difficulties of cultivation remain fo rmidable. As a result, agar-

agar will not - at least fo r the fo rseeable future - provide an easy solution to the

economic problems of people trying to survive along Indonesia's littoral.

The risks of cargo transport

While petani nelayan may try their hand at cultivating seaweed instead of

extracting other resources, some Sarna people have decided instead to go into the

transport Qf goods. Sarna people use a variety of boats, and boat building is fa irly

common in Southeast Sulawesi's Straits ofTiworo.47 A numberof Sarna boat builders in

Southeast Sulawesi trace their interconnections and their boat-building abilities back a

couple of generations toNakhoda Manting, whose grandchildren and great-grandchildren predominate in positions of local authority in coastal and island villages throughout

Southeast Sulawesi as well as beyond it.48 Non-Sama people sometimes come to help build boats in Tiworo as well. Usually these are men from Ara, a South Sulawesi village fam ed fo r producing generations of boat builders.4 9

47 This is not the place togo into a typology of boats, but one caveat should be noted: that contrary to some widespread notions, particular kinds of boats are not the exclusive preserve of particulargroups of people in the region. See fo otnote 35 below. 48 For instance, the Imam of the main mosque in Poso is part of this family. 49 In 1994, for instance, buildersfrom Ara came to Tiworo to help with work on an enormous wooden boat which, cradled in its scaffolding, towered at least three stories highover its quiet island boatyard-host. The Sarna boat-builder in charge of this construction, a Sarna Haji with a Bugis-style house in an almost exclusively Sarnavil lage in the Straitsof Tiworo, said, in April 2000, thatthis boat, built fo r a man in Ambon, was over twentymeters long from stemto stem and had a tonnage or carryingcapacity ofover 200 tons.

57 One type of boat frequently encountered in the Straits of Tiworo is the perahu

/ambo', a cargo boat common throughout the waters of Southern Sulawesi. 50 One of the

Sarna /ambo' captains I knew in the 1990's who gave me safe passage across the Gulf of

Bone, told me on the journey why he was nearly ready to stop making a living from

shipping. It used to be, he said, that transporting raw logs from one province to another

was a fine thing to do. But then the government made it illegal to transport "first class" wood from one province to another. "First class" types of wood were highly valuable

species such as teak, which in fa ct had been planted on nearby Muna Island in the late colonial period under the Dutch. The idea behind the Indonesian government's decision to ban the inter-provincial export of raw timber was to encourage value-adding at the local level. Indeed, inthe years fo llowing this change, I myself noticed more local processing of wood on Muna Island: there was a new sawmill outside of the main town Raha, and in

Raha itself, there was a furniture workshop turning out some well-crafted pieces. The sawmill, however, was owned by a Malaysian Chinese man, and the furniture workshop was owned and staffed entirely by Javanese people. "Value-adding" turned out to have a distinctly extra-local flavor.

But other results of the inter-provincial ban on exporting raw logs were a concern to this captain. While continuing to transport wood under these circumstances - that is, as contraband - indeed had the potential to add value, engaging in a trade now deemed illegal brought with it correspondingly high risks. Since the trade had been reclassified as smuggling, the boat now hadto be loaded in a place wh�re there were no whistle­ blowers, and the cargo had to be carried acrossthe Gulf at night. This is what the captain began to do. It was, however, one trip in particular that soured the captain's taste fo r this

50 On the etymologyof /ambo' see below page I 04 note I 09.

58 trade, and here is what happened n that trip. After crossingthe Gulf of Bone, which took two nights and a day, and getting to the mouth of the river he sought - ovemighting again there to catch the morning's rising tide - the captain then piloted the /ambo' upstream and past the fa ncier-looking boats berthed along the river's edge. These were the boats of wealthier Bugis traders and they did not reflect straitened circumstances, or the need to keep a low profile. Once they delivered their cargo, the captain and his two-man crew took their pay and headed back downriver. Yet when they again reached the coast, they were waylaid by the "water police" (polisi air), who took them in fo r questioning. The

51 police questioned them, took all their money, and then let them go.

To be sure, it was a risky venture. However, the number of speedboats owned by the marine police - very fe w - and their unbelievably impeccable timing made me suspect that a double-cross was afoot. The captain did not offer this interpretation, but then again, he did not really need to. The Bugis boss got the delivery of his cargo, and instead of directly greasing the palms of the authorities to look the other way, he may have tippedthem off to the boat headed back downstream and let them collect their cut indirectly. After this, my captain friend decided that the risks were too high, and he worked for a while shipping rice locally instead. In2000 he began looking fo r some startup capital to buy an outboard engine: he hoped to starta transit service to ferry people across the channel between the island where he lived and Muna, where people must travel if they want to go to market.

Wood smuggling, fo r its part, has skyrocketed since Suharto's fa ll in 1998. It has nearly been a free-for-all, and if the forestry service was seen as inefficient before, its

sJ As the Captainsaid, they were "processed" - in Indonesian: diproses, from the Dutch: proces (lawsuit, case).

59 agents are widely rumored, at least in Muna, to be making out like bandits now. The

rumors about them say that the Forestry Police catch local people cutting trees illegally,

confiscate the goods, and then turn around and make a tidy profit on their sale. In the

context of the country's steep economic downturn, teak is easy money, and it is hard fo r people, officials or not, to see the fo rest fo r the trees, or rather, its well-being fo r the potential revenue from logs. A political-economy fo cused on wood is, in fa ct, nothing new in Muna. Except fo r their longstanding rivalry with neighboring Buton, the politics of Muna - especially during and since the late colonial period - is the politics of wood

(''politik Muna adalahpolitik kayu"). Yet the phenomenon of rather well-heeled out-of- towners suddenly coming to make use of any local connection they might have in Muna to get their hands on wood is remarkable. This post-Suharto free-for-all in wood - and especially in teak - has had relatively little to do with Sarnapeople, their participation but a tiny dribble in the recent flood of wood smuggling. 52 Yet, when they do engage in such ventures, their relatively low status may well make them more vulnerable than others to the risks involved. The expansion in the scale of fo rest extraction is similar to that seen in the fisheries, a process which, as I outlined earlier, has marginalized small-scale fishers.

Below, I discuss various other resources that Sarnapeople have been the initial extractors of, and on which, where still possible, they continue to rely.

52 For an indication of the seriousness of the problem in Muna and also the possibilities - only recently ­ of printing something about it, see the Gatra articlesby "Tma and Ant" listed in the references: "Kerusakan Hutan di Sultra Memprihatinkan," "Pencurian Kayu. Anggota DPRD Sultra: Ada Indikasi Keterlibatan Oknum TNI/Polri," and "Penyerobotan Hutan Lindung: Bupati Muna Ancam Pecat PNS."

60 Extraction of othercoastal resources

It is not that Sarnapeople no longer fish or gather sea produce. Quite a few still

do, but the extent, the means, and the targets of extractionare often notwhat they used to

be. Tripang, or sea cucumbers, which have long been gathered, cured and traded by sea

people, are no longer as important a commodity as they once were, for as with fish, the

populations of tripanghave also diminished. The trade in tripang from island Southeast

Asia via Mak:assar to China dates back to at least the early eighteenth century (Sutherland

2000), and it is likely that Sarna people were involved as initial extractors even then.

Tripang collecting voyages from Sulawesi regularly extended to the outer arc of the

Lesser Sundas in the mid-18thcentury (Fox 1977; 2002). During the nineteenth century,

tripang were regularly gathered in the Aru region of the Arafura Sea (Wallace 1869 II:

158 in Fox 2002; also see Fox 2000) and on the northcoast of Australia (MacKnight

1976). Thiscommerce was so impressive that in 1839 Earl noted that the trade in tripang

on the northcoast of Australia alone, the entire produce of which was taken to China, far

exceeded in value the fur-trade carriedon between the northwest coast of America and

China (Earl 1839:14 quoted in Fox 2002).

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the tripang trade began to decrease

and it continued to diminish in the twentieth century (Fox 2002: 12). Recently, the search

for tripang with high market value in theArafura and Timor Seas has, reports Fox, become "ever more problematic," implying an unsustainable level of harvesting by both

Sarnaand often better-equipped non-Sama fishers, and leading the formerto shift to the

extraction of other species (Fox 2002: 13). Inthe Tiworo Straits, older Sarna men and

61 women recalled the previous species diversityand abundance of tripang, and saidthey

saw a dramatic decrease intripang populations durint' their own lifetimes. Their stories

are certainly not contradicted by the sparseness I witnessed, intermittently between 1990

and 2000, when accompanying people to collect on the tidal flats of Southeast Sulawesi.

Fox (2002) reports, in addition, how people froma fishing village on Rote in the

1990's learned - from Sarna people - to shift to lucrative shark fin fishing as tripang and trochus became increasingly scarce. The Sarna people who shared theirknowledge ofthis technique came from Wanci, an island in the Tukang Besi chain offSoutheast Sulawesi.

They used the village on Rote as a base fo r collection ventures further to the south, and had similarly shifted the target of their collecting efforts earlier (Fox 2002: 13-15). 53 The challenge of regulating such collection voyages, which venture into richer waters now underthe jurisdiction of Australia, hasresulted in a massive apprehension and burning of vessels fo r illegal fishingin the Australian Fishing Zone (Fox 2002: 15-16; Stacey 1999).

Similarly, I learnedin the 1990's about periodic flotillas - at least in part from theTiworo region - which went to "Kupang" to gather trochus. "Kupang" was a euphemism for the nearby waters of Australia in the southern reaches of the Timor Sea. Despite stories of an occasional bullet fired across the bows of their ships, veterans of such voyages sometimes

53 Fox (2002) presentsthe Bajau or Sarna people fromMola on Wanci "and other nearby Bajau villages" as having begun to shift to sharkfin fishing in the 1980's in response to: scarcities oftripang, being outcompetedby other groups who utilizediving equipment, and the rising price of shark fin. It should be noted, however,that sharkfin fishing by "Baj aus" fo r the China market goes back over ISO years in the Banggai and Sula Islands (Hart 1853: 104 in Sopher 1965: 149). Although Mola is not in these latter areas - it is between themand Roti -such a shiftas Fox describes to shark fin fishing is nonetheless likely to have been one among a range of options long fa miliar to Sarnapeople at Mola, who are part of wider networks of both kin and knowledge.

62 joked that it was a delightto bejailed in Australi�since one's upkeep there was provided for. 54

Concernsabout the regulation of resource extraction are oftenframed by the largerissues of rights and sustainability. Intensive shark fishing, like intensive tripang and trochus gathering,has threatened to diminish the species in demand beyond the point where their populations may viably reproduce. Yet while regulation through the state is oftendeeply flawed and through markets is non-existent, devolving regulatory powers to local "stakeholders" turns out not to be so easy. The question of who has rights to these resources and who may allocate them remains unanswered, and as Fox points out, there's no guarantee that anyone given such rights would allocate resources responsibly (Fox

2002: 20; Atkinson in Zerner,ed. 2003). "The present hope," Fox argues, "and it is only a hope - is that by redistributing rights more equitably to the communities directly linked to these resources, we will restructure a balance that has been sadly disrupted and rekindle a commitment in local communities to the welfare of future generations" (Fox

2002: 20; see also Zerner, ed. 2003).

There is certainlyroom fo r hope. For instance, young men and women on islands in the marine protected area of Taka Bone Rate - the thirdlargest ato ll in the world

(Chou 1998) - impressedme with their willingness to play an active rolein island mapping exercises. These exercises comprised partof the enviromental education efforts

of a Makassar-basedNGO, and their consequences were importantfo r CO REMAP •• the

Coral ReefReha bilitation and Management Project. COREMAP, aimed at safeguarding the coutry's dwindling coralreefs andslowing degredation, is apparently having limited

54 "Enakdipen jarakanAustr di ali - digaji!" Literally: It's great("delicious") to bejailed in Australia ­ [you're) salaried!

63 but encouraging results: live coral cover inTaka Bone Rate increased significantly by

6.3% from 23.8% to 31% over a recent two-year monitoring period (Chou, et al. 2002: 4).

However, thedevolution of management in partto local communities in order to

increase their sense of being stakeholders in the well-being of the environment is having

decidedly mixed effects socially. When I arrived at an island in the north end of Taka

Bone Rate in 2000, the official vessel on which I hitched a ride was greeted by a small

boatful of young men in black t-shirts who turned out to be the local environmental

''wardens." Why, I wondered, if these wardens were members of local society, did they

live in a house separated from all others, apart from the kin networks in which they

would have had the greatest impact and in which their own behavior could also be

55 socially monitored? Some ofthese youths were apparently permitted to carry guns in

their capacity as wardens, and I was shocked, along with local residents, when one of

them, obviously not a Sarna person, had the impudence to bring his rifle into someone's

56 hou8e on a "social" visit. Thatthis house belonged to a Sarna family in a portion of the

village predominantly populated by Bugis people was cause for concern, fo r political

power in South and Southeast Sulawesi as well as in these Flores Sea islands, tends to

57 restin Bugis hands. Furthermore, for thisyouthful non-Sama "warden," fe arless of

opprobrium, to carry a rifleinto a Sarna homewas a stark reminder of how Sarnapeople

were presumed to lack authority in such mixed ethnic social spaces. If, as appears to be

55 The people residing in these island villages were not partof societies with customary "men's houses." Organizationsof preman, a wordthat means streetkids or hoodlums but may also encompass tight cliques of youth withrivalries, were, however, a common feature of urban life in late� and post-Suharto Indonesia. Predominantlyyoung men and teens, theyoften engaged in pettyextortion andprot ection rackets. 56 Afterwards, the residents explicitly commented on how bringing arms into someone's house was just not something that was socially acceptable. 57 This is generallythe case, exceptin some areas or particular villages where the population is mostly Sarna, e.g., in parts of the Tiworo Straits. In the Tukang Besi chain, predominantly land�elling others who variously consider themselves linkedto the Wolio political center in Bau-Bau,Buton, play a similar role to the Bugis furtherwest.

64 the case, such "policing practices" serve to reinforce the relatively low position of Sarna

people in local social and political hierarchies, then it seems less likely that they will

become, as is sometimes hoped (inter alia, Dj ohani 1996), conservation-oriented

stakeholders. Small wonder then, that when, during my stay there, I heard a large boom

in the distance one day, and, turning to the Sarnapeople nearest me asked more-or-less

rhetorically, "Did you hear that?" They basically replied, "Hear what?" The boom was

probably a fishbomb, and I took this "unhearing" to imply that they knew what was going

on and did not feel particularlymotivated either to acknowledge it openly, or indeed to

stop it. In other words, they did not act like stakeholders. Attempts to institute local

protection of resources must, as this illustrates, contend not only with the fo rce of

economic compulsion, which may drive people to engage in unsustainable practices like

fishbombing, but also with the existence of complex inter-ethnic as well as social class

hierarchies. It is not hardto imaginewhy people at the lower end of these hierarchies

might be reluctant to accord recognition to those at the local level who, like these

"wardens," in practice abuse or flaunt an authoritybacked by the state, when to do so

would not only narrow the already slim avenues for survival but would also give a leg-up

to one's would-be oppressors. 58

Where extraction of a particular resource is legally restricted yet the resource is

still available and in highdemand, it is economically a tremendous temptation -

especially if one needn't go all the way to Australiafo r it. Turtles, for example, protected

in Indonesia at the federal level since 1999, are still easy to find buyers fo r within the

ss Another way social hierarchy factors into fishbombing is that this practice tends to be embedded in unequal relations of production. In the words of anexperienced Sarnafriend: "where there's a fishbomb there's a boss."

65 country.59 I have occasionally known Sama people to cage juvenile turtles below their

houses in the tidal zone. Although I have heard a couple of people say that they will later

simply be released - a conservationist plan that is literally too good to be believed - at

least some of these, it seems obvious, will be sold when they have grown. Only once did I

see turtles on the way to market. I had stopped bythe house of an acquaintance on an

island where I sometimes stayed in a cluster offSin jai in the western Gulf of Bone.

There, one evening, I saw some turtles walking around on the floor of his porch. My

· curiousity drew me to a room offthe side of the porch, with a cement floor, no furniture

and a single weak light bulb dangling from the ceiling. Below the bulb two young men,

surrounded by twentyor thirtyturtles ambling around in the shadows near the walls, held

just a single turtle in the middle of the floor, over which one poured boiling water to

soften the shell, while the other then triedto cut the shell away from the body with a hack

saw. Needless to say, it was still alive, and the eeriest thing, as I watched it there, more or

less poised upright on its tail, was that not a single audible sound issued from it as it

slowly waved its head and legs back and forth. I realized, of course, that this was taking

place at night for a reason, and that there was little I could do about it even if I wanted to.

Turtles headed fo r Bali, the destination for most of the archipelago's illegal turtle trade

(Triwibowo 2001), are commonly shipped alive. Judging by the methods used in this

case, however, I didn't thinkthe animals were likely to survive fo r very long after the

shells were removed; they may well have been headed for Makassar where turtle isprized

in ethnic Chinese cuisine. Beyond this point, the turtles were not likely to keep fresh

without refrigeration.

59 See the articles on penyu hijau in the daily Pildran Rakyat, listed in the references.

66 Refrigeration on boats is still a fantasy for Sarnapeople. Even being able to affo rd fuel - diesel for marine engines and gasoline fo r outboard motors - is difficultfo r most small-scale fishers. If people in more "remote" areas had cold storage on-board boats, they might be able to break their dependence on middlemen in order to genheir catch to

60 larger markets where fish sell for more than they do in villages. Most Sarna, however, still have limited access to electricity in their homes at best - enough fo r a fe w feeble lightbulbs inthe evening - and more oftenthan not, on small islands anyway, the power is supplied by local people with diesel generators rather than by the state electrical company. This intermittent source of weak electricity is not enough to make large quantities of ice to store a good catch. One needn't have refrigeration to salt and dry fish, a very old practiceindeed, and some Sarnapeople continue to do this, but it has become much less common. Sarnapeople themselves scorn dried fish, which is only eaten when there is nothing fresh to be had. But it has become less common fo r them to produce dried fish because there is less demand for it in towns and cities where established fish markets, easily procured ice and some refrigeration make fresh fish - which other

Indonesians also prefer - more readily available than in the p�t.

Flexible fishing

Despite theabsence of refrigeration on Sarna boats and the rarity of it in most

Sarna villages, ice is, nonetheless, sometimes available. A friend of mine in the Straits of

60 Sarna people do offerfish fo r sale in their hoinevil lages, if there are any thatexceed the modest expectations of distribution among close kin. Their neighbors may find such fish "expensive" but they are a fraction of the costs encountered in town markets. Below r discuss a new structure of productive relations in which buyers come directly to island villages.

67 Tiworo, for instance, had spent some time tryingto make a living by collecting crabs herself and buying them from others. She would store them in an icebox, using ice that was delivered once a week fromthe pr ovincial capital, Kendari. When she had collected enough of them, she would transportthe crabs to Kendari. The scheme, however, did not last long; it was apparently defeated by the hassle and cost of taking the goods to Kendari to sell them. Still, the icebox and the ice had enabled her to accumulate stock over a period of time. Without ice, she would have had to sell them in a smaller, closer market, perhaps even in her village where they would be likely to go for less, or else distribute them among kin. Without cold storage, moreover, one would need to organize the collective labor capable of gathering enough crabs (or other goods), in order to make a trip to market worthwhile. With ice, however, the labor of seeking and collecting produce for sale could apparently be more independent, or at least more loosely coordinated.

This is what has, in fact, happened among many of theremaining small-scale fishers in Southeast Sulawesi. The availability of ice for storage has made possible a change in the patterns of how labor is organized fo r fishing and gathering, making the labor of tangan pertama seem more independent. Yet these changes in how labor is organized are also more than simply the result of the existence of new devices for storing maritime produce. Iceboxes and ice, for instance, are themselves provided by fishing companies which have boats thatnow make the rounds to buy up whatever is in the iceboxes. Consequently, while fishers who operateon a very small scale appear to preserve a degree of independence and control over their own labor, they are much more directly tied in to the global fishingeconomy. This form of labor is, in effect, the piece- work of the fisheries industry.

68 On Pulo Tasippi, an island in the Tiworo Straits, Mbo'Ndaco 61 described to me

how this system works and the prices he could expect fo r different items. Mbo'Ndaco

had risen at fo ur to go offfrom his small house by the water. He later returned home with

fish fo r his fa mily, and with eleven udang kipas or slipper lobster (Thenus orienta/is).

These were not fo r fam ily consumption, but for sale. The eleven udang kipas weighed I.9

kilograms, and he would, he said, get 30,000 rupiah per kilogram fo r them. At pre- 1997

exchange rates, this would have been about 12 or 13 U.S. dollars per kilogram. With the

rupiahhovering between eight and ten thousand to the dollar at the time, however, this

comes to less than fo ur dollars per kilogram. Either way, the price is a fa r cry fr om what

Th enus orienta/is sells fo r at the other end of the industry.62 It is likely that Mbo'Ndaco

had also been paid less fo r his produce before the 1997 economic crisis than just after it.

The fa ll of the rupiah produced a windfall on agricultural exports such as coffee and

cocoa (not to mention teak) and the value of fisheries exports would likewise have � soared. The peak exchange rate (15,000 rupiah to the dollar) did not last long, however,

and inflation soon fo llowed, driving up theprice of domestic goods.

Mbo'Ndaco ran offthe going rates fo r other maritime produce as welL From Pr3

Philips, an American company, he said he would get 6,000 rupiah per kilogram fo r crab.

For spiny lobster, pricing depended on variety and size. He mentioned two kinds of spiny

lobster: the multicolored udangmu tiara ("pearl") or Ornate spiny lobster (Panulirus

ornatus) and udang bambu, the Painted or Blue Spiny Lobster (Panulirus versicolor).

61 Mbo' is a tenn of address fo r elderly people. In Sarna."tasi pp i" (Indonesian terjepit) is tobe squeezed, pinched, or hemmed in. Here, the island is squeezedbetween others. The interaction and fieldnotes are dated 28 March2000. 62 For instance, on I February 2003, 3 pounds or 1 1-13 tails of thenus orienta/is ( 1.5 kilograms) cost $69.50 at htfJ)://www.land-sea.com/index.asp?PAGEID=CATALOG&CATEGQRY=Lobster. That's $46.34 per kilogram, not including shipping. This species hasa variety of names, including Spanish or Sand lobster, and many more names in Australia. such as the Moreton Bay Bug. 63 "PT" is the Indonesian equivalent of "lnc.Ltd."

69 Ornate spiny lobster of the "number one" size, that is, each weighing 0.9 to 2.5

kilograms, were worth 125,000 rupiah per kilogram. Larger than that size, in the "super"

category, they could be worth up to 175,000 rupiah per kilogram. Those in the "number

two" category, weighing only 0.5 to 0.8 kilograms, were worth 80,000 rupiah per

kilogram. Undoubtedly these amounts fluctuated, and he seemed proud to be abreast of

current prices.

To give the reader a better sense ofjust how global this industry is, I will briefly describe how I double-checked the names of the creatures Mho' Ndaco brought home to

his icebox. Since "udang kipas" is not in my dictionary, I went online in the hopes of

finding an English or Latin name fo r it. I plugged "udang kipas" into a popular search engine and one of the results was a web page with a list of "non-fish marine resources from Indonesia." The list had the common species names in Indonesian on the left,

English in a center column, and the Latin equivalents on the right. 64 Then, wishing to confirm visually that, indeed, I had the right species, I did a search fo r "thenus orientalis photo." One of the firstpictures I fo und was on a website for a Belgian frozen seafood company. It listed (in French) "Queues de Cigales" with "thenus orienta/is" beside it.

There was a link to the photo, below which was a note stating that these Queues de

Cigales originated in Thailand. 65 The web page on which this product appeared, the

Belgian seafood company's offerings of "other crustaceans and molluscs," also listed marine produce originating in, among other places: China, SoutheastAsia, the Bahamas, and Chile. Probably Mho' Ndaco's udang kipas did not wind up in Belgium, but they could well have. Furthermore, the fact that the website listed all these places of product

64 http://a uxis.tripod.com/ab/non-list.htm. 65 http://www.hottlet.com/Fr/tileslautres.htm. One can, incidentally, access this site in Dutch, Gennan and �nglish as well, however they will only ship within Europe.

70 origin not only hints at the quality of these commodities. These place names also provide

buyers with a way to experience vicariously the world's geography, and suggest that they

consider themselves "global" subjects. At the same time, behind the presentation of

product information and images, the labor processes that produced these commodities

and the social relations implicated in their production lay almost perfectly concealed. 66

What were these social relations and how were they structured? According to

Mho' Ndaco, PT Darma andPT Kembar Jaya, both Chinese ownedcompani es - by

which he meant Indonesian ethnic Chinese - came around Pulo Tasippi frequently. PT

Sultra Tuna, a provincial branch of another Indonesian company, also made the rounds,

as well as a Japanese company, PT Anagi, which, he added, also buys anything - "(and)

they all take fish as well." All the companies, he explained, went around to the penampung, literally the person or thing which intercepts and retains something, in this

case we might say "the collector" or "the gathering point." In Pulo Tasippi alone there were seven of these gathering points. Ice is brought to them from the companies, "each of which has an ice fa ctory." "So," Mbo' Ndaco' continued, "if Anagi provides ice, and

Darma takes the produce, then Darma also gives ice." I asked whether the company that had provided the ice would be angry if another company took the produce stored in the icebox. "They wouldn't be angry," he said. "That's what you call speculation. But if you borrowcapital [from a company], then you cannot sell to another. It's rare that someone

66 This is slightly different from Harvey's discussion of how time-space compression has radically changed the mix of images and commodities that go into the production and reproduction of everydaylif e. Harvey considers the concealment of product origins, labor processes and social relations to be part of how the interweaving of simulacrain daily life bringstogether diff erentworlds. I emphasize, on the one hand, the way that the indication of productorigins plays into the construction of "global subjects," while on the other hand, the concealment of labor processes and social relations keeps different worlds apart. This difference is, I think, largely oneof analytic perspective. In other words, it is a result of whose "everyday life" is brought into fo cus. Harvey's view, needlessto say, represents an occidentalist reading of everyday life. See Harvey (1990: 300). Also see DerekGregory (19 94: 413).

71 needs to borrow capital, though. If you don't borrowcapital , then whoever's price is high,

that's the one you sell to."

According to Mbo' Ndaco, Danna Samudra was the firstto operate this way in

Tiworo. This kind of system, he said, had been operatingthere since 1989, eleven years

before our conversation took place. I recalled that others had noted recent changes in the

littoral environment and I asked him whether there was a scarcity of fish. At first he

explained how the local monsoon seasons affect species abundance in the area. In the

west monsoon, he said, "It's a fish flood here!"67 That is, from September until about

January or February, there are lots of fish, of many kinds. Then from March until June,

"Thisplace is slipper lobster central," he exclaimed. "But," he went on, "if you compare

it with twenty or thirty years ago, it's completely different." A man who joined us concurred. Born in 1967, this man cameto Pulo Tasippi in 1978. "It really started to decrease in 1980," he said. "Nowadays there are modem instruments (a/at-a/at)," by which he meant that one now commonly encounters the use of "modem" fishing technologies aimed at large-scale extraction. "But in the old days, with a dragnet (pukat tonda, "tow net"), just rowing or using a sail, you could get [literally] a ton. Now, even if you're at sea for a month you might not be able to get (mencapaz) a ton. Before 1980 there were lots more fishbeing salted - laid out to dry all around the villages." But neither he nor Mbo' Ndaco offered any conjectures as to what had caused the decrease in fish populations.

Since at least 1989 in this area of Indonesia, then, a system of production has emerged in which individual fishers, working in arelatively depleted environment, sell

67 Indonesian seasons arenamed either11wet" or "dry"on the one hand, or, on the other, are named after the direction (moreor less) from which thepreva iling winds come.

72 their catch eitherto those companies who have provided them with capital, or to those company boats which have good timing and a reasonably high bid. While these fishers appear to retain a high degree of autonomy and control over their labor, they are nonetheless very closely and directly tied in to the global fishing economy, and their position within this system of production is analogous to those who do "piece-work" in the clothing industry.

We might call this post-fordist, or flexible, fishing.68 Like the geographer Derek

Gregory, I, too, have reservations about how sharply David Harveydraws the distinction between "fordism" and "flexible accumulation" or "post-fordism" (Gregory 1994: 412, n. 1 90). For one thing, my interest here is less in regimes of capital accumulation than in systems of production; we may, moreover, findthat it is not so important a distinction to draw. Harveyhimself points out how Marxnoted in Capital that the fa ctory system can intersect with domest.c, workshop and artisanal systems of manufacture (Harvey 1990:

187). I would suggest that the especially "post-fordist" or "flexible" fe atures here are innovations in the spatial organization of production. To analyze this dimension of recent

Sama livelihood practices in Indonesia, I findthe work of Doreen Massey ( 1994) most helpful.

In contrastto the position of "piece-work" fishers visited by company boats, yet just as much an example of this flexible spatial organization of production, is the work of those who performrepetetive tasks in what one could call the branch workshops and production units of the coastal fisheries industry. These "branch workshopsn and

"production units" are places where women - invariably, it seems, women - do low­ skilled wage labor, such as carefully extracting the fleshof crabs fromtheir shells, or, for

68 Menzies(2003) also refers to "flexible fishing" and Neis (200 1) deals with similar matters.

73 instance, cleaning offoyster shells to make them accessible to the next stage in the pearl

culturing process. This work takes place in the "rural" littoral zone, away from urban

centers where the waters are too polluted to serve the aims of production.

"Branch workshop" is a termthat applies to how production is organized fo r

deshelling crab, work that is done by women wearing plastic smocks and gloves, arrayed

around large tables in a simple structure - a large shack really - located close to the high

water mark. In Southeast Sulawesi, such crab workshops are fo und here and there,

usually on the outskirts of large coastal villages with easy access to transportation

infrastructure. The workshops are dispersed, decentralized in relation to where the rest of

the processing or production takes place. Production, in other words, is broken down into

the component parts of a process and the different parts take place in different locations -

what is called a "part-process structure." This functional structure of how production is

spatially dispersed has the effect, among other things, of short-circuiting labor's abilityto organize. Italso makesit difficult fo r workers to communicate their claims on the obligations of management who are offin a distant cityor another country.

Pearl-culturing, in contrast, is organized not in this kind of part-process structure with branch workshops, but rather in more or less self-contained "production units."

There are two pearl culturing sites at the southern end of Southeast Sulawesi's peninsula, both Japanese owned and operated, one in the Straits of Tiworo and the other in nearby

6 Kolono Bay. 9 Each morning in Tiworo, young women from villages on neighboring islets are picked up by the company boat and after a day at low-skilled manual labor, they are brought back again to their villages in the late afternoon.

69 Furthernorth there are other sites. The Japanese company established its office in Kendari, the provincial capital, prior to 1990.

74 In Japan, the pearl-culturing industryhas similarly drawnon a "rural" fe male

surplus labor pool, namely the off-season labor of local women abalone divers. 70 Like

these women, their Tiworo counterparts are also not employed in the closed room where

the nucleus of the cultured pearl is carefully inserted into the oysters. Rather, they do the

manual labor of hauling the oysters up from their underwater dwellings, knocking off the

growth accumulated on their shells, and brushing them clean enough to be pried open by

others, either to be checked or further treated before being sent back out to be submerged

again in the coastal waters.71 It is hardly surprising, of course, that Japanese pearl

culturing companies should expand their production operations to a country where local

people presentlyhave almost no control over the allocation of coastal space and where

labor is phenomenally cheap. In this case, although the production process is largely

contained within one unit, production units are themselves dispersed from each other and

physically distant from the top levels of management in Japan. No less than in the part-

process structure of the crab deshelling workshops described above, the way pearl-

culturing production is spatially decentralized similarly impacts labor's position in relation to management.

In her discussion of how production was decentralized in late twentieth century

Britain, creating the structures upon which new sectors were later built, Massey

emphasizes that spatial organization is an important element in any exploration of the nature of uneven development. "One way of approaching this," she explains, "is through the conceptualization of the spatial structuring theof organization of the relations of

70 The fo llowing is basedon time spent in Japanese fishing villages with predominantly fe male ama abalone divers during 1989-90, under theauspices of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. 71 It was a statedprivi lege to be able to watch this process in Japan, the detailsof which at the time I was asked notto divulge, and which I am sure is not openly shared with the majority of their employees in either locale.

75 production" (Massey 1994: 87). What she calls "spatial structure," illuminates what is

essentially afunctional geography of the social relations of production (Massey 1994: 90,

101 ). In otherword s, she describes a set of relations that are conceptualized and

organized spatially, but which is undergirded by a functional logic. In my examination of

decentralized coastal production, not only the functional, but also the physical

spatialization of these sites in the littoral is fundamentally important. Their location in the

littoral is, of course, materially crucialfo r the simple reasonthat these endeavors must

take place in a relatively unpolluted coastal environment with the right conditions in

which to culture pearls or to obtain freshly caught crabs. Yet in addition to this material

consideration requiring that production be located in the littoral environment, there is

another reason to physically locate these operations there, asocial reason, namely, the

presence there of readily available labor.

Sarnalivelihood practices through Sarnaterms

Below, I return to the question of why there is a surplus labor pool of Sarna women available fo r employment in the branch workshops of deshelling crab and in the production units of the cultured pearl industry. In order to understand this geography of laborand why such a surplus labor pool exists, however, one must first know more about the sorts of work women have previously done, and one must therefore gain a better grasp of how, more generally, Sarna people have heretoforegleaned a living from the seas and the littoral. Although up to thispoint I have said relatively little about how coastal and maritime livelihood practices are referred to in Sarnalanguage, in what

76 fo llows I discuss how certain terms characterize different sorts of fishing and collecting

endeavors. These Sarnater ms, which below I call "styles," refer as much to particular

patterns of labor as they do to culturally specificways of making a living on the seas and

coasts.

One can think of Sarnafishing and collecting practices along two axes: method

and style. 72 By method here I mean simply the technique of fishing, either in its

"traditional" or in its expanded capital-intensive versions. For instance, the general term

fo r all forms of fishing with a line is missi' (fromniss i', Indonesian pancing). Under this

category of "fishing with a line" there are a range of particularmethods which one refers

to with diffe rent terms. Miseah, for instance, one such particular method of line fishing, is

to use a baited line that moves through the water as one rows quickly. One may, however,

use this same term to refer to longline fishing, in which multiple (hundreds or thousands)

of lines with baited hooks branch offa main line. Whether one catches one fish or

thousands of them, whether, that is, one uses a single baited line rowed quickly through

the water or the capital-intensive set-up known as longline fishing, both techniques may

be referred to by the same Sarna term fo r this method: miseah.

By style, I refer to how one goes about the sort of venture one is on. Pongkeq, fo r

instance, means to make a living by going out in a boat, by oneself or with one's fam ily,

for a few days, weeks or months, usually travelling from market to market in order to sell one's catch and to buy necessities. 73 On pongkeq one does not have to limit one's

72 My treatment of each is by no means exhaustive. 73 Sama people in Sulawesi's southern littoral gave somewhat conflicting descriptions of pongkeq, but agreed on this loose framework when pressed on the specifics of what it usually involves and what it may or may not include. Lowe (2003) renders it pongkat, in the dialect where she conducted research, the Togian islands offthe north coast of Central Sulawesi. Some descriptions ofpong/ceq tie it toa particular kind of boat, a soppeq, which used to be common among Sarna people in Sulawesi. Although the soppeq is widely perceived to be a Sarna vessel, in fact it has also been used by non-Sama people, and Sarna have

77 endeavors to a particular species or a given method of obtaining it. Whether one fishes

with a line (missi�, employs a spear with one point (tiru } or a fishing trident (sapah),

uses a seine or dragnet (ringgn, sets a rattan fish trap (bubu), or releases a poison (bobo),

one may still be engaged in pongkeq, for it is a style of fishing and collecting, not a

particular technique. Pongkeq is not about the method one uses, but the ·sort of venture

one is on and how one goes about it, that is, in a relatively small boat, alone or with

fa mily - male or fe male, child or adult - fo r a vague amount of time ranging from a fe w days to a fe w months, and often travelling, as noted above, frommarket to market.

One may contrastpongkeq with sakei, another Sarna style of making a living on the waters. Sakeiis to go offto another region fo r a long period of time, usually a year or

more, with a relatively larger boat that is fully equipped fo r the tljp. I take Fox's descriptions {mentioned above, 2002) of trips to gather tripang, trochus and shark fin as, almost certainly, examples of sakei. Those who go on sakei may be groups of men, but they may also be fa milies, including women and children. Sakei is defined both by the fo rmerly used and lived on other boats such asjarangkaq. I would stressthat pongkeq as well as sakei, which I discuss below, are particular practices, neither definedby the type of boat nor by the methods of fishing and collecting one may employ in them. Pongkeq andsakei sometimes appear in the literature as part of a trio of terms describing "traditional Bajo fishingprac tices." The third term is "palilibu," a word that drew blank stares from multiple informants in Southeast Sulawesi. Dj ohani ( 1996), fo r example, discusses these "three" practicesand reduces the differences between them to one merely of relative distance, statingthat pongkeq takes a few days and "palilibu," conducted near thevilla ge, takes a fe w hours (Djohani 1996:265). Such descriptions of these practices in the literature - quite a bit narrower than those I encountered in the field - and in particularthis trinity, tendto be in work by authors who have not actually spent much time in Sarna villages. More importantly, though, this trio ofterms and the heavypromotion of the soppeq as a "traditional Bajo boat" may betraced toa single source, from whom I myselfheard these things authoritatively described in 1990. This source is a man who spent his childhood in a Sarna village in Tiworo, but who left itat an early age. Most of his adult yearswere spent in Jakarta and then later Kendari, the provincial capital of Southeast Sulawesi, working as a journalist fo r the government newspaper Pelita until it fo lded in the early 1990's. He returned withme to visit his natalvil lage fo r the firsttime after a hiatus of many years during my first pre-graduate trip to Tiworoin 1990. A classic ethnographic "culture broker," he has continued to set himself upvis-a-vis outsidersas a spokesman for "his people" -aself ­ presentation thatrested in parton claims to elite (bangsawan) status and to an authoritythat remains unrecognized among his Sarna(which is to say his maternal) kin. He generously shared his nostalgic(and sometimes infantilizing) characterizationsof "the Bajo" with any interestedpersons, especially fo reigners, who happened to pass through Kendari, and his position as a culture brokercrucially rested on this location, and - most importantof an - on his ability to speak English.

78 long length of time involved, and the fact that during this time one lives in that other

place and away from one's own region. Furthennore, contrasted with pongkeq, sakei

involves a capital investment, both in relatively larger boats as well as in the supplies and

the gear that people require to cany off a venture that is at least minimally profitable.

It is worth noting here that these "styles" of making a living, practices that involve

a great deal of mobility, nonetheless contrast sharply withthe nomadic placelessness that

characterizes stereotypes of Sarnapeople - or one should say, using the exonym, "Bajo"

people - in the discourses of outsiders, both Indonesian and non-Indonesian. While Sarna

do not, as a group, trace their mythified collective "origins" to any singularplace on land

as many groups in Indonesia do, along Sulawesi's southern littoral, Sarna identify

strongly with the particular locales they come from and their travels fo r pongkeq and

sakei, as well asother kinds ofjo urneys, are hardly what one would call an aimless

wandering. Pongkeq and sakeiare not random migrations, but are, rather, culturally

specific practices, styles of making a living by fishing and collecting, that eventually

returnpeople, for the most part, to the littoral places from which they hail. 74

In contrastto pongkeq and sakei which are both boat-basedprac tices, nubba

(from the root: tubba) is a practice of gleaning from the tidal flats what remains after the

tide has gone out. 75 Sarnawomen, and to a lesser extent men, gather various kinds of

produce on the tidal flats, especially during spring tides when the flats are most exposed.

If tripang is gathered, women tend to do the labor of preparing it fo r sale, and if slipper

lobster is fo und it is likely to be sold as well. Yet much of what is caught on seemingly

74 Lowe (2003)and Sather(1 997) similarly encounteredstrong ties to local places among Sarna people in theTogian Islands of Sulawesi and southeastern Sabah, Malaysia, respectively. 75 AlthoughVolkman (1994) describes a verydiff erent sort of shiftin livelihood practices that have little to do withsuch low-tide gathering - a change in some Mandarwomen's work from weaving to selling fish - thispract ice of nubba nonetheless calls to mind the title of her article,"The Sea is Our Garden."

79 casual trips across the tidal flats -including small fish, squid, molluscs, and crab -is for

domestic consumption andtherefore an important part of the subsistence economy. As a

practice, nubba is more method than style. It is a technique of gathering food or produce

which one does not have to travel far to do, but one may do it on one's travels too. It is

also, however, in part, a style, for it is a way of going about making a living in which one

may employ various techniques depending on what there is to find. One might use a snare

to catch lobster, a net to catch small fish in tide pools, a machete to pry loose molluscs, or

just pick up tripang offthe sand.

It may sound like collecting on the tidal flats does not entail much skill, but the

reality is quite the contrary. For one thing there are hazards- poisonous species that one must know to avoid. But aside fromhazards, thereis a wealth of knowledge and know­ how that goes into reading the environment and skillfully reaping what it presents.

Consider, for instance, what it takes to find and catch crabs. In the day they often lie beneath the sand, and to notice them at all one must be aware of a change in the density beneath the surface on which one is walking. Once found, the crab must be held down in place with one hand, while the other hand reaches around andunder its back end (and how does one know which end this is when it is in the sand?) to pick it up and toss it into a bucket. Alternatively, one may render the crab harmless by breaking offa tiny side leg and, using it as a nail, hammer it into the weak spot just behind the joint of the claw to disable the claw from closing. Such are the skills used on nubba.

What recent changes may be discerned in these livelihood practices? In part as a result of the decrease in fish and other species over the past two decades, the role of nubba in subsistence has greatly diminsihed and the practice of pongkeq has become

80 much less common. How fish scarcity and decreases in other species affect sakeiis

harder to determine. It is practically impossible to ascertain whether or not more people

are going on sakei, yet the distances people travel to do it are certainly far - as

mentioned, fo r example, in the discussion above, to "Kupang" or the waters of

Australia. 76 It is likely, however, that in order to make sakei trips worthwhile, people may

be travelling far ther afield than they did previously77 and, where they are able, to use

more capital-intensive methods of extraction; fisheries economists would say that they

are increasing fishing effort to compensate fo r the lower yields.

These changes in Sarna livelihood practices in turn have a number of effects.

When a previously common boat-based practice such as pongkeq becomes increasingly

rare, that avenue fo r both women and men to be on the water - not to mention children -

consequently narrows. As for sakei, with the attempt to compensate fo r lower yields, it

appears to be getting more exclusively male-oriented. With the increase in "fishing effort" and with the increased use of "modem" versions of fishing technologies, to say nothing of risk, there is a perception that men are the more appropriate laborers, producing a more sharply gendered division of labor and more homosocially male spaces of labor on the sea. Inaddition to older boat-based practices changing, new ones are

76 I say it is "practically impossible" with an emphasison practicability. Even setting the limits of such a survey presents a challenge - would one survey how many people fromgiven a locality were said to be gone on sakei during a specific time? But then one ought to go and see what they are really doing, and people go to a variety of farflung places for many reasons. If their trips were of questionable legality, would they be likely totell an outsider about them, even a sympathetic ethnographer, or might this not effectively be "informing" on friends orkin? Would, fo r that matter, an ethical ethnographer put subjects in the position of risking her presence on an illicit venture, or would the ethnographer travel such distances, even in mutual trust, at the risk of being caught by the authorities of one or another country? Such are the westions that might beleaguer the researcher who would attempt toundertake such a study. As Fox (2002) tries to show happened with tripang collecting over a period of roughly two centuries. For an account of migrant flsherfolk from Palawan in the southwestern Philippines {most probably Sarna) having to go fa rther and, because the fish stocks are so low, use cyanide and flshbombs in orderto make collecting ventures worthwhile, see the BBC webcast "ReefGrief' by Orlando de Guzman {October 3, 2002).

81 being taken up. Over the course of the 1990's, fo r instance, commercial purse seining

expanded in one village at the eastern end ofthe Tiworo Straits. Purse seine boats became

more numerous and were crewed exclusively by men. 78

Other factors besides a capital intensification of sakeiand the perceived suitability

of men for this labor may also help explain why fe wer women spend time at sea than in

the past and why the social environment there is increasingly male-oriented. Women79

now, for their part, appear to have a variety of reasons to stay at home in the village. The

desire to keep their children in elementary school, as well as mass-media disseminated

ideas of fe male beauty, influence their decisions not to undertake distant sea-travel for

long periods of time, as occurs on sakei. True, not all Sarna children fe el compelled to

attend their compulsory education, especially when they have fe w opportunities to

continue beyond the most basic schooling without leaving their natal villages and

immediate family. Yet, with the poor economic circumstances on the coasts and

nationwide ideas connecting status to the level of one's education, parents often view

education as a means "up," and even thoughnot many of their children in fact get to

pursue this route very far, there is, nonetheless, pressure to keep children at home while .

they are still school-age. There also appears to be social pressure on girls and young women, especially those of the "elite" (bangsawan) social class, to stay at home, although

it is very difficult to gauge how this compares with past practice. A popular Islamic perception that unmarriedwomen of good breeding should not stray fromhome, as well

78 Sather (1997: 80) notes that,among the Bajau Laut of southeastern Sabah, ice manufactureand mechanization of boatsbeginning in the 1960's meant that "fishermen became less dependent on the labour of their wives and children" to salt and dry fish. Mechanization further resulted in a major shift in the nature of boatcrews away fromfamily units toward shorHerm all-male crews aimedat pulling in larger catches. Firth ( 1966) noted a sharply gendered division of labor among Malay artisanal fishers even prior to the mechanization of fishing, as compared with peasant agriculture. 79 I am including in the category of "women" those fe w transgendered cross-dressers who participate in largely fe male-gendered roles.

82 as state-sponsored gender ideologies of the Suharto era promoting women as

homemakers, may be as much a fa ctor in this as ideologies brought by television satellite

dishes that portray "beautiful" women as pale-skinned, thereby discouraging women fr om

getting darker skin as a result of going out in the sun, or, as local beliefs would have it,

the wind.80 Such perceptions of the importance of education and the means to signify

status and beauty thus also factor in to a dynamic in which fe wer Sarnawomen are on

boats.

The decrease in certain practices like pongkeq and nubba, alterations in others

such as sakei, and the taking up of new ones such as commercial purse seining, are part

of a larger picture of how changes in the environment and political-economy impact a varietyof social relations. Not least among these changing social relations are the gendered segregation of labor practices and the spaces in which they take place. In the past, fo r instance, Sarna women also fished, travelled and lived on boats, alone or with fa mily, and they continue to do so. However it is less common fo r women to be on boats than it used to be, it is much less common fo r a woman to go offin a boat than it is fo r a man, and it is less common fo r a woman to go off ina boat than it is fo r her to go off to the tidal flats with a small group ofkin and friends. Sarnapeople do not have prohibitions against women on boats as the Bugis do, though, and women do still spend time on the water, just rather less of it than seems to have been the case a generation or two ago.

The decrease inpong keq,the increased male homosociality of other boat-based practices, and the limited fruitfulness of nubba, then, have all contributed to the development of an especially fe male surplus labor pool, appealing to and available fo r

80 Needlessto say, thisidea of paleness as beautiful is as connected to class ideologies as it is to racialized colonial ones.

83 industriesthat have moved into the littoral. Employment in the branch workshops

deshelling crab has the "benefit" of enabling women to stay out of the sun and the wind,

while theboat transportation provided for young women who work in the production

units of the cultured pearl industry ensuresthat although they leave their villages, they do

not go fa r and are returned home to their fa milies every day after work. As dependence

on the cash economy continues to rise, these examples of wage labor become rare

"opportunities" for women to support themselves and their fa milies while continuing to

live in the coastal zone.

Social Transformation

In analyzing the declineof small�scale fishing among Sarna people in Indonesia, I

have attempted, as Goto (1995) suggests, to get beyond the dichotomy of subsistence and

commercial fishing in InsularSoutheast Asia.81 I have also taken to heart a point

advocated by Fox (2002: 19�20), that in additionto a better understanding of resource

ecology in Indonesia, we need a greater understanding of the social ecology of resource

use. Yet we also need to be able to analyze how the social ecology of resource use relates

to the workings of capital. I have tried to bring together my knowledge of a range of

contemporary Sarnalivelihood practicesin an attempt not merely to list a collection of

old and new ways to labor on the seas and coasts, but to illustrate the extent to which

these livelihood practices are formedand reformed in the spaces where the condition of the environment interfaces with the structuresof capitalist production.

81 Seealso Moeran (1992) who disputes the usefulnessof these tennsas employed by the International Whaling Commission.

84 Looking at how small-scale economies relate to wider political-economic fo rces is

hardly a new concern in the study of Southeast Asian artisanal fisheries. Indeed, along

with exploring on its own terms the "rationality" of Malay fishermen, the study of their

small-scale peasant-like economy was Raymond Firth's (1966) main concern. Yet

situating the changes taking place among contemporary Sarna communities in and around

Sulawesi's littoral regions demands a perspective that is fundamentally attentive to more

complex ways of thinking about space than the "local" and, in effect, the "wider." What

"local" might be in such a context of dispersed nodes yet interrelated networks of Sama

sociality is unclear and hard to defme. Yet what is clear is that its formation as "local" is

not simply relative to scales of provincial, national and regional political imaginaries.

"Local" is also constituted, in part, through the very processes of how production is

spatialized. This insight implies the need fo r a multi-sited approach that is not limited to

rigidly circumscribed areas, in part because of the flexible and decentralized ways that

production may be organized spatially, but also due to the fa ct that, as mentioned above,

we are dealing with interconnected littoral zones as well as widespread networks of Sarna people.

Examining the relationship between Sarna livelihood practices and changing political-economic structures also requires an approach that is not framed by the discourse, or better: the litany, of ever-dwindling Sarna "nomadism" and their apparently ever-increasing sedentarization. While issues of mobility and settlement are certainly important fo r the study of Sarna social worlds, this recurring and rather evolutionary trope contributes to the reproduction of a nostalgic perspective on Sarna people and their

85 pasts.82 The prevalence of thistrope, both inacademe as well as in the field, and the air of

nostalgia that invariablyaccompanies it, obscures our ability to critically discernhow the

fo rms and structures of thesepresent transformations compare with those in the past, with

those in other parts ofSoutheast Asia, and with those in other parts of the world.

Agricultural studies of the 1970's, fo r instance, debated the issue of whether a

capital-intensive and capitalist technology would lead to increasing class divisions that

might in turn create the conditions fo r revolutionaryinsurgence - whether, in other

words, the green revolution would turnred (Gupta 1998: 26-7). While no simple

proletarianization of small-scale fishersis happening here, it is still worth considering

what kinds of questions from agricultural studies may be instructive in this case.

Substantial work has been done on agrarian transformations in Southeast Asia, analyzing,

fo r instance, how local-level mechanisms of labor control andaccumula tion both

participated in and(in some cases) altered larger political and economic fo rces (Hart, et

al. 1989). I have tried here to make a contribution to the study of related processes of

transformation in Southeast Asia's coastal zones. 83 Yet drawing analogies to agrarian

transformations remains a formidable challenge. Perhaps this is due, in part, to the

concepts we are accustomed to using in analyses of such transformations, so many of

which -like "enclosure," "tenure," even "peasants" - are not as easily applied to such

82 1n this, it is on the one hand intimately connected to discoursesthat "primitivize" Sama(or "Bajo") people, who, it seems, can never - in the eyes of other Indonesians - be settled enough (read: can never be as modemas we are). On the other hand, nostalgia fo r this presumed lost past of "nomadism" participates in the dominance of progress-oriented developmentalist discourses in the region. Lowe's recent(2003) contribution, with its critical perspective on the image of Sama as a "nomadic" people, is a welcome addition to the literature. 83 Other works with similar aims are: Bailey (1986, 1988a, 1988b, 1988c); Bailey and Zemer ( J992a, 1992b); Ghee (1991); Jomo (1991); Pollnac, Bailey and Poemomo (1992) and Kleinen (2003). Most work along these lines hopes not only to perform analysis and critique but to offer policy recommendations; all may beconsidered contributions to what oughtto be a larger fieldof study linking political economy and social transformation affecting the people of the region's coasts.

86 watery places. Consequently, although it has great heuristic value, asking the question

that drove the work of Scott (1985) and Gupta (1998) - whether the introduction of a

more capital-intensive method of agriculture sifted rural society into capitalists on the one

84 side and the landless proletariat on the other - has limited use in this context of life in

the littoraland work on the seas and coasts. 85 Its usefulness is limited not only for the

seemingly land-locked connotations of these terms of analysis, but also because the

processes of contemporary uneven development in Southeast Asia's fisheries and coastal

produce industries, with their dispersed and remarkably flexible spatial forms, preclude

any such simple sifting into "haves" and "have-nots." What does remain useful from

agricultural studies is the more general question of how new technologies and

organizations of production affect class and other social relations. Yet we need fresh eyes

to do this sort of analysis in such liquid territory.

One of the aims of this chapter, then, has been to document ethnographically how capital-intensive fishing technologies and new structures of production have impacted the lives and livelihood practices of Sarna people. I have tried to show how these technologies andstructures of production alter the everyday lives, not of the "rural poor"

-on whom Scott and Gupta focused - but rather of these people in Sulawesi's southern littoral. In illustrating recent changes in their livelihood practices and examining the

84Gupta (1998: 27 and 343, note 32) notes that this, in fact, was the central question animating Scott's "magnificent work" on rural Malaysia, We apons of the Weak (1985). 85 Fisheries economists, fo r theirpart, usually pay littleattention to theempirical social context of resource use, still less tothe relation between local economies and the broader emergent structures of capitalist production. This may be starting to change: the MARE Centre fo r Maritime Research held a conference in 2003, and one previously, on "People and the Sea" in which biologistsand social scientistsactua lly seem to learn from each other. As for the usability of fisheries data in Indonesia, the statistical data produced during the Suharto erawas not unlike the reported achievements of agricultural productivity in the late colonial period. Asthe coral reefecologist Mark Erdmann (2000) put it, "consecutive Suharto-era five year plans (Repelita) thatinevitably called for a more intensive fisheries effort ...by 'official' fisheries statistics ... predictably showed a perfect increase in catches in line with the demands ofthe Repelita." Needless to say, he does not believe these statistics areterribly valid.

87 environmental and economic circumstances under which they cobble together a living, I

wish to emphasize that the conditions fo r the reproduction of Sarnaways of life fo cused

on the sea are undergoing profound changes. In addition, then, to alterations in the

practices of everyday life, there is another importantpoint I am driving at, namely that

the conditions may no longer exist fo r a certain kind of Sarna cultural reproduction. Yet

86 this does not mean cultural death; rather it is social transformation.

All these things that I have described arepieces of a larger picture of

transformation: the marginalization of small-scale fishers bycapi tal-intensification in the

fisheries industry; the marked scarcities in the coastal and marine environments and the

efforts made to extract and sell resources that remain; the changes in Sarna livelihood

practices - in the "styles" of how one goes about the sort of venture one is on, and the

related shifts in how workis organized socially; and finally, the structural changes in the

social relations of production, including "piece-work" fishing as well as wage labor in

86 Space does not permit a fullcomparison here, but a related sort of transformation to what I've been discussing, in terms ofthe role of political economy and the sheer scale of environmental changes, plus the effects of both on forms of everyday life in new social formations is nicely described in Metcalf (2002). I bring out the point about cultural death, which may seem obvious to some of my readers, because of the preponderance of discourses about ever-decreasing nomadism and ever-increasing sedentarism. Since practically and also ideologically, their"identity" is linked to notions of them as "sea people," these discourses imply not just nostalgia fo r vanishing ways presumed to have existed, but also an anxiety about Sarna culturaldeath -a version of "disappearing primitives." Perceptions of Sarna cultural disappearance are not uncommon in the anthropological literature as well as in contemporary Indonesian journalism. Pelras was concerned about what he described as increased contact with other descent groups as a resultof Bajo settlement, especially in the Pulau Sembilan group, in the 1970's (Pelras 1972). Verheijen (1986: 30) saw causality working in the opposite direction: along with "interferenceof the government, new fishing devices and more modernised living," he similarly assumes that there is increased "intermixing with other tribes," yet saw this increased "intermixing" as a cause of increased sedentarism. One wonders how either author could knowhow much "intermixing" therecould have beenat an earlier time. Moreover, it hardly seems fairto assume that increased settlement would lead toless interactionwith other groups - given the links betweenmobility, livelihoodand trade. Nonetheless, Verheijen, apparently confidentthat Sama/Bajau peoplehad previouslybeen isolated,claimed that "Thesede-isolational influences will increase the disintegration of both theSarna culture and the Sarna language" (1986: 30). Below, I takethis claim to task. Contemporary popular media also portrays a "death knell" for the Bajo, although what it describes is much morea widespreadproblem ofinfi'astructural "improvements" on some more densely populated coasts and harbor regions. These infrastructural projects, sometimesre moving coastal people outright, make life in the strand a health hazard and makea sea-faring life for the poor well-nigh impossible. See Hudijono and Azis (2001).

88 industries newly arrivedto the littoral - industries with vezy dipersed and flexible fo nns

of spatial organization. The largerpicture of which these are all a part raises the question,

especially poignant it seems, given the dispersed character of Sarna communities, of what

the future shapes of Sarna social reproduction may be.

Even with the ravaging of the coastal andmarine environments, it seems likely

that Sarnapeople will continue to maintain settlements on fa r flungstretc hes of coasts

and small islands -places that may be less remote than they seem to city dwellers and

landlubbers. If boat building can continue, then an increase in trade - "legal" and "illicit"

fonns - is likely to fillthe gap as subsistance strategies based on the environment's

bounty wane and dependence on the cash economy continues to increase. Petty

merchants, usually Bugis, selling clothing and housewares, already make the rounds of

coastal villages periodically. Local Sarnapeople voyage to town - in small boats and then

public minivans, or on large boats the whole way - to bring back major staples such as

rice. But unless there is a sudden rise in the number of enterprising saleswomen who

travel by boat to these villages to hawk their vegetables and bananas, then - the small

gardens of some Sarnapeople notwithstanding - travel by coastal villagers to the smallest nearby local markets will of necessity become a more common partof everyday life. An

infonnal industry in motorized local coastal transportation is likely to grow around the

need for such trips. Smuggling of various kinds by various nautical actors is only more likely to rise if the economy worsens, but in anyevent will expand as the subsistance base deteriorates further and the government continues to lack the resources to stop it. 87

87 See for instance the piece describing theimport of secondhand clothing via Singapore and Malaysia. "Used Textiles Continue to Flood Sumatra,Jakarta.," http://www.bharattextile.com/newsitems/1979955, November 25, 2002. While this article mentions only Sumatra and West Java (Jakarta), this is likely only

89 Yet the kinds of smuggling most likely to in the fu ture of the coastal poor are of the be

more "downmarket" variety: such as the vast used clothing market and cigarettes, not arms or what is more common these days, people. The latter, in any case, require

connections with urban crime rings and corrupt officials, and most Sarna people, already subsisting on the edges of governance, are not likely to have the social access to cultivate

such high-end players as associates or even as patrons.

Outmigration from coastal villages to urban areas both within and outside of

Indonesia is likely to increase. This will swell the Sarna neighborhoods that already exist, for instance, in North Bali and in Jakarta - neighborhoods whose neighbors often do not know that they are living next to Sarna "sea people. " Yet this does not necessarily mean that coastal villages and coastal society will decimated. If people do passably well in be the cities, they will likely only reinforce existing networks of migration and kinship between these moreurban areas and Sarna villages in other parts of the archipelago.

These existing networks persist despite the fa ct that Sarnapeople, dispersed along the coasts of Island Southeast Asia, have had neither socio-political unity, nor a political imaginary that would lend them a shared place of mythic origins. Except at the local level, they seem to lack the structures, they through labor, politics, or what is be commonly called "civil society," through which to disseminate self-conscious consideration of their current shared situation in Indonesia, or to attempt the organization of widespread collective projects to address it. Yet, once again, the issue here is a matter not of "disappearance" but of social transfonnation. Whatever shapes social reproduction takes, we should no more consider the far-flung distribution of Sarna communities an

because they are the largest, most dense markets for these goods and therest of the archipelago is probably much less familiarto the reporter.

90 obstacle to it in the future than the absence of fo rmal political unity was a hindrance to it, as far as we know, in the past.

91 Chapter 4

Tales of the Sama past

Although Sarnacommunities are scattered along various coasts of insular

Southeast Asia and have never, historically, had political unity, there is nonetheless a

certain similarity to their stories of the past. Like the tales I encountered during

fieldwork, Sarna stories of the past attested in the literature usually deal with relocation

and often center on the figure of a high status Sarna woman. She is referred to not by a

proper name but by a kin term or a title, and what happens to her in these stories always

involves the members of another descent group.

These stories have intrigued scholars and travelers, who have mostly read them as

clues to Sarna origins or as evidence of a link {or a desire to link themselves) with the

prestigious kingdoms of fo rmer times (inter alia: Frake 1980; Liebner 1998). We will

look at an example of theseviews below in a retelling of one version of the Sarnapast, a

creative adaptation by a Dutchman who wandered the coasts of Celebes and spent time

among "the Badjau's" in the early twentieth century. This Dutch version, a fascinating

piece of work in its own right, is included here fo r the sake of contrast, fo r my own

interest in these stories is different from those who see in them clues to Sarna origins or

mine them for evidence of links to the bygone kingdoms of powerful others. In analyzing a number of somewhat disparate versions, my approach is first to read them for what they

92 each present as significant to their primary audience, Sarnapeople, and second, to read

them comparatively. Setting them against each other, I hope to show how the concerns

and themes they share illuminate what, in some renditions, is left unsaid. There are two

stages to the comparisons I carry out below: first, I discuss some short versions of Sarna tales of the past froma wide range of Sarnalocations, including the Southern Philippines and Northeast Borneo. Then second, with these as contextual background, I look in greater specificity at three closely related, longer versions: one in a Bugis-Ianguage

manuscript, one in a Sarna language extended oral telling, and the third - which I introduce shortly below - in a typescript by a Dutchman who spent time in coastal

Sulawesi during the 1920's.

Such comparison permits an approach that arguably puts a check on the interpretive whims of the analyst and it relies on something more thanbegging the trust of a reader. In other words, instead of pulling an interpretation from a single text, or reading the subtext out of one particular version, this approach, which draws on a wider field of related narratives, better enables me to point out substantive concerns left implicit in one version, by showing how they are more explicitly addressed in others. What I aim to do here, then, is not simply what one might call a "close reading," but something more grounded and methodologically more ethnographic. 88 I am especially interested in how this approach helps clarify a version of the story fam iliarto numerous Sarna people in

Southeast Sulawesi and beyond it. Both for this version and fo r a range of others, what comes more sharply into fo cus as a result of setting these stories against each other is a concern with subordination, or the potential for it, in the relations between members of different descent groups.

88 Unfortunately one cannot relyon "native exegesis" here; see footnote 59 below.

93 One could only veryloosely call this analysis philological. While the different

versions appear in both manuscript form and in oral accounts, in either case, my aim is

not to discover which ones are more prior or more genuine expressions of some

imaginary ur-text. This, at any rate, would be a fo ol's errand. For one thing, the

anonymity of how these stories were created and recreated makes it impossible to locate

the presence of an authoritative subjectivity lurking behind them. And if pinning down

some kind of authorship is unfeasible, narrowing the dates fo r the inscription of

manuscripts is almost as difficult.89 Furthermore, the verious versions, like the people to

whom they matter, are not bounded by place - they come from Sulawesi's eastern and

southeastern coasts, from eastern Malaysia, and fr om the southern Philippines. One might

be tempted to think that with detailed knowledge about the movement of people between

these locations we could trace shiftsin narrative. However, we neither have such detailed

knowledge about historical interconnections, nor could we rely on it in such an endeavor,

fo r the diffusionistunderpi nnings of this idea overlook the rather Boasian fact that people

and narratives do not necessarily move in congruent ways. With this scattering of places,

un-ascribableauthorship and a lack of datable clues, therefore, one really cannot attempt

90 to establish sequential relations between such disparate versions. Itmay, then, beju st as well that I am not so interested in ordering a succession of "textual" products, but

89 I will have more tosay about this below. However, on the basis of paper alone - there being little else concrete to go by - narrowingthe date of one manuscript was a challenge even with the help of a well­ knownMalay manuscript scholar (Russell Jones). 90 In contrast, those rare instances wherethe movement of people and manuscripts can be traced, as in the next chapter, enable us to consider the significance of manuscipts in social practice, and the role they play in the character of interconnectedness as well as in its extension.

94 endeavor instead to examine a social logic that these narratives share, and one which

factors into how they are reproduced.91

The various versions are also not bounded, as one might expect of philology, by a common language. Indeed, the languages in which these stories circulate among Sarna communities and to which they have been translated or retold by interested outsiders is a

fa irly complicated matter. Among Sarna people, these stories of the past are not only related orally in Sarna butalso circulate, albeit with some rarity, in Bugis-language lontaraq manuscripts.92 Although I deal in the next chapter with the Sarna social contexts of manuscript possession, circulation, and restricted access, Southeast Asianists will be interested to know here that these texts are not read aloud to public audiences, nor are their stories a part of ritual or theatrical performance. Nonetheless, some oral transmission takes place, and although manuscripts are rare, quite a fe w older Sarnamen and women outside the Bugis heartland of South Sulawesi are literate in Bugis. 93

Many more manuscripts seem to exist in rumor than do so in fact. Certainly, though, such manuscripts are not merely rumored to exist, for I have examined two manuscript versions of the Sarnapast written in Bugis, as well as some other Bugis- and

Makassar-language documents held by Sarna people. 94 Why Sarnastori es of the past are

91 What I mean by examining their social logic is akin to putting the focus of the analysis of myth not on "history," but on social process (in the terms of Bohannon 1967: 265-27 in Hoskins 1993:16). 92 The name derives from thefo rmer use of lontarpalm leaves. In Sulawesi, these leaves, once inscribed, were attached end-to-end and reeled up - rather like film. In practice, however, "lontaraq" now means something written in a South Sulawesi orthography. 93 I discuss Sarna literacy in Bugis in the next chapter. 94 Rumored copies are discussed in the next chapter as well. Of the two manuscripts about theSarna past I have seen, here I consider only one: "LB Lemobajo.11 This isshorthand for 11/ontaraq Bajo from

Lemobajo, 11 a term that I came up with and not one that is in use in the field. I photocopied this ms in 1990 · with theexpress permission of its ownersfo r whom a photocopy wasalso made. At the time they lived in Lemobajo on the eastcoast of Southeast Sulawesi, although thiswas not always the case. The other Bugis­ language manuscript, in a practiced and consistent hand, is held in the archives ofKITL V and I will likely examine it more closely in the future. This manuscript (or copy, or "inscription") has a cover sheet indicating that it was made in Makassar for the colonial Matthes Stichting in 1940, and that it is a copy of a

95 written in Bugis is a question that has incomplete answers and is a topic that I also

address in the next chapter. Part of the answer, however, lies in the simple fact that

avenues for learning to speak and read Bugis were open, and that Sarna appears never to

have been a written language. At least, I have never encountered any South Sulawesi

orthography, nor any Arabic-derived script, used to write Sarna, and do not believe that

95 Sama-language lontaraq manuscripts exist.

Like other literary and historical products of southern Sulawesi, Bugis-language

manuscripts about the Sarnapast have their counterparts in fa irly well-known oral

96 versions. Unlike other Bugis-language manuscripts, however, the oral versions of these

97 stories are not generally known among the Bugis. Rather, they are fam iliar to certain

manuscript from Kolonodale, far up Sulawesi's east coast. Comparison of the manuscript holdings listed in the catalogues fo r collections in Indonesia and in the Netherlandssuggest that this manuscript was probably moved to the Netherlands shortly after World War Two. The Matthes Stichting was the colonial precursor of lndonesia's Yayasan Kebudayaan Sulawesi Selatan dan Tenggara {the Institute of South and Southeast Sulawesi Culture). The institute had been named after Dr. B.F. Matthes, who was "sent out" by the the Nederlandsch Bijbelgenootschap to Makassar in 1848 and who laid a most impressive fo undation for the study of the languages and literatures of South Sulawesi. On his life and work, see, inter alia, van den Brink (1943). 95 1 am grateful to Daeng Ngago in Takalar and his family, who allowed me to photocopy some of their Makassar-language lontaraq materials, rather than access them through the National Archives' South Sulawesi manuscript microfilming project. This enabled me to fo llow through on a lead to a "Lontaraq Bajo," which Daeng Ngago owns, and which,thanks to the kind work of Abdul Kadir Manyambeang, I now know is a manuscript that has more to do with "B�eng" {a place in South Sulawesi)than with anything"Ba jo." Daeng Ngago's granddaughter, Ani, who worked at both the South Sulawesi and Jakarta branches of the National Archives, was also of invaluable assistance. She helped to decipher other materials held by Daeng Ngago written in the older orthography used fo r Makassarese, sometimes referred to as ''jangang-jangang" script and occasionally called "Bajo" writing. These brief materials were not about anything "Bajo" either, and with the exception of one shortpiece in an unidentified language, were all Makassar-language documents. 96 On the porosity ofthe oral-written divide in Bugis literature see: Pelras (1979); Koolhof(l999); Tol (1990); elsewhere in Sulawesi: Cummings {2003) and George {1990; 1996); also seeFlorida (1995) ; Sears { 1996); Sears and Flueckiger ( 1991 ); Sweeney { 1991 b); andthe now classic workin relation to the Malay world, Sweeney {1987). 97 I will have more to say about theSarna socialcontexts of manuscript possession in the fo llowing chapter. Although such stories of the Sarna past are found in Bugis-language manuscripts, unlike other parts of the corpus of Sulawesi manuscripts, these stories are generally not known to Bugis people, orally or in manuscript form. Even Muhammad Salim, a teacher and profiCient translatorofBu gis lontaraq with whom I worked, had not previously known of these Sarnastories about the past. Salim reads lontaraq manuscripts as easily as one reads thenewspaper, and his knowledge ofBugis lontaraq is quite broad: fo r instance, he compiled much ofthe catalogue for themanuscript microfilmingpro ject in SouthSulawesi at the National Archives.

96 segments of Sarna communities, generally those who claimdescent from high-status

Sarnalineages (Indonesian: bangsawan).

This is usefully instructive, fo r it pushes us to consider the porosity between oral

and written realms of Sulawesi "literatures" in specific terms, not only as a characteristic

of the narrative traditions of one or another ethnic group, nor even just in terms of genre,

but more broadly in relation to social and historical context, and more acutely with regard

to the specificity ofnarra tive. Of course, it makes sense to view the relation between oral

and written realms in terms ofgenre, since, fo r instance, episodes of the Bugis "epic" I La

Galigo, or the chronicle of one or anotherkingdom, are more likely to exist in oral

98 versions than, say, court diaries are. However, this unusual situation in which tales of

the Sarna past cross not only the boundaries of the oral and the written, but also the

boundaries of two quite distinct languages, reminds us of how important it is to consider

other factors that also play a role in this written-oral relation.

Chief among these is the simple fact that particular narratives speak to particular

audiences; that is, some stories address themselves more to some listeners or readers than

to others. And what a narrative conveys to its audience has a bearing on both whether it is

reproduced, as well as the way in which it is conveyed. Whether oral or written, how

narratives are conveyed - in on-stage productions and courtyard readings, in street theater

and backroom discussions, or in lullabies and heirloom manuscripts - their mode of

transmission and reproduction is morethan just a technical matter. The way a narrative is

conveyed -.not just the mode employed (writtenor oral) but how it is delivered - has

98 La Ga/igo, the most famous of South Sulawesi literary productions has often been termed an "epic" due to themythic character of its story, especiallythe voyages of itsmain figure,Sawerigading, as well as fo r its vast, if indeterminate, extent. The scare quotes are a nod to Sweeney's railing against the similar use of the term in the Malay context (199la: 26}.

97 salience and relevance to particular social contexts, and thus may not easily be summed

up in generalizations about, say "orality," or "literacy" or even (in this case) "Bugis

99 literature.11

Are these Sarnastories of the past part of "Bugis literature"? This is a question

whose answerI shall leave to experts in that subject Inthe next chapter I will have more

to say about the fo rms in which these narratives are conveyed in Sarna social contexts,

including more on the relation between written and oral narrative practice. In most of this

chapter we shall remain fo cused on the stories themselves, on tales of the Sarna past, to

examine what they say to those marked both as audience and, in a sense, as referent. For

whether or not Sarna people take such stories as having "really" happened at some point

(and quite a few either do not, or reserve judgement), these stories nonetheless do very

clearly signifY something about "our (Sarna) ancestors."

It is particularly intriguing, therefore, to find a Sarnastory of the past that is retold

in the voice of a colonial Dutchman. Before we go on to look at Sarna stories of the past

that are aimed, more-or-less, at a Sarnaaudi ence, I will discuss this Dutch rendition. As

mentioned above, I consider this work here mainly for the sake of contrast and as an

example of an approach that reads such stories fo r clues to Sarna origins and as evidence

of links (or a desire to be linked) with the prestigious kingdoms of others in the past. Like

the manuscript I encountered in Southeast Sulawesi, this Dutch adaptation of the tale is

comparatively lengthy. In its outlines, however, it fits perfectly well with themain

countours of many versions in which a high status or "royal" Sarna woman in her boat is

. swept out to sea and eventually winds upmarryi ng a man from the royal lineage of

99The general point here is Sweeney's: "'Orality' and 'literacy' are not independent entities subject to immutable laws; they can only be observed in the context of specificsocieties, and studied in relation to the social structure ofthe society inquestion" (1987: 66).

98 another descent group. In order to understand some of the telling ways this version diffe rs from others, though, and to appreciate the sheer quirkiness of this creative endeavor, one needs to know a bit about its unique features and the circumstances that enabled its production. I discuss these matters in the next section and then later in the chapter draw contrasts with other versions of the Sarna past.

Burghoorn'stypescrip t: "De Badjaus"

In 1968, Jacobus C'Koos") Noorduyn, a scholar with expertise on Celebes

(contemporary Sulawesi) received a letter at KITLV, the Royal Netherlands Institute of

Linguistics and Anthropology, where he had been working since 1962.100 The letter came from a P. Burghoorn and it accompanied a typescript some eighty pages in length about

"the Badjau" sea people. Burghoorn, it appears, had been the Head of the Technical

Service with the Fisheries office in North Celebes and he often came in contact with the

Badjau when he "travelled around the East coast of Celebes from 1927 to 1930.'"01 The typescript he sent Noorduyn drew on what he had learned then, as well as on earlier

102 experiences in otherparts of coastal Celebes, beginning at least in 1923. It is clear

100 On Noorduyn's career, see Poeze ( 1991 ). 101 "Toen ik van 1927 tot /930 op de Oostkust van Celebes rondtrok kwam ik vee/ in aanraking met een goedmoedig zeevo/kje." Burghoom, P. ca. 1965. "De Badjaus." Unpublished typescript and letter. KITLV DH 1240, p.l/11. All translations mine. The quirkypage numbering fo llows Burghoom's original. Burghoom viewed "the Badjau" almost quaintly, referring to them (note the diminutive "zeevolkje"), as a {tood-natured little seapeople. 2 Of Burghoom's official capacity, no record hasyet beenfound. He appears neither in the Landbouw registers nor in the Regeringsalmanak fo r the J 920's and the 1930's. My thanks to Sirtjo Koolhof, Chief Librarian at KITLV, for assistance withchecking these. Nonetheless, by Burghoom's own reckoning he was in various parts of Celebes for most of the 1920's. In addition to the quote in the previous note, he makes the followingfo ur statements in "De Badjaus": n. . bijmijn verblijfin midden Celebes en wei in de vorstendom Tolitoli en Boeool. .. "(p. la/4); "De Balangbalangan-eilanden werden door mijvoor het eerst n bezocht in de jaren /923·tot 1926 . .. (p. 4/X); "Jk zelfben tiental/en malen in die omgeving geweest [Siginti Bay, Poelias, westcoast Mid-Celebes ] daar ik als opzichter Landschapswerken in die omgeving

99 from his letter that Burghoom finished his manuscript on "the Badjau" with some encouragement fromNoorduyn. However, it is not at all certain when the bulk of it was composed. He wrote in his letter of 1968 that an earlier letter from Noorduyn had,

"inspired me to work full time to complete the promised work. Three-quarters of the manuscript was already done and the concept of it already (in mind) fo r months." Those

"three-quarters ...already done" were, then, most likely written sometime in the previous year or two before he sent offthe typescript with this letter from March 1968.103

Although Burghoom had a great deal of firsthand knowledge about life on the coasts of Celebes, he explicitly apologized in his letter to Noorduyn for the unscholarly way his manuscript was written, lamenting his ignorance of cultural anthropology at the time he undertook his research some fo rty years earlier. 104 This lack of formal anthropological training on his part is something we might paradoxically be grateful fo r, since, as a result, the frank observations he made reveal the insights, assessments and perspectives ofan interested and informed non-specialist of the time. Burghoom may not have been an anthropologist, but the considerable amount of time he spent among

"Badjau" communities on Sulawesi's coasts and offshore islands is plainly evident from the richly detailed depictions of what he saw. Within the frame of a larger narrative, he describes a remarkable range of activities: from the play of boys and girls in thewater and theproficiency they develop - equally, he insists - in swimming, diving and sailing, to the production of salt and sago and the manufacture of lines and sails. With similar

vee/ gebruik maakte vanhun prauwen" (p. SIX);and " ...toen ik als Hoofd Te chn. Dienst bijde Zeevisserij

O£ hetStation Air- Tembaga zat, noord-oostkust van de Minahasa•.• " p. 6/X. 1 3 Burghoom, in his letter dated 1 March 1968, accompanying the typescript, "De Badjaus." · 104 Having lamentedthe unscientific resultsof his efforts, he ends the letter with: "It has thus become an ordinary story. Ihave sometimes thought thatit could be made into a fine 'documentary' film. A good script-writercan take it in all kinds of directions, and the 'modem' {?viz., postcolonial} vision and still remain a documentary."

100 attention to detail he describes the methods of righting capsized boats and the exquisite

skill and cooperation required in the risky hunt fo r rays. Burghoom was a patient

observer anda careful reporter of technical skills and material processes of production, a

sort of connoisseur of practiced techniques. He was, in short - as one might expect of a

colonial official - a purveyor of knowledge about native industry.

He was not, however, as skilled an observer of social fo rms or processes of

communication. In fact, apart from the narrative framein which he embeds these

descriptions of skill, technique and material production, there is strikingly little

description in his typescript of what one could call "the social."105 The technical and

practical flavor of these descriptive passages consequently sets them apart, not only from

Burghoom's pseudo-historical introduction, but also from the narrative frame in which he

situates them - a version of the story in which a 11Badjau princess," as he would say, is

lost at sea and ends up marrying the son of a Sultan.

Although he does not describe much about the perspectives and dynamics of their

social interactions, Burghoom's own attitudes toward "the Badjau," as well as toward the

Dutch, do, at points, come through the text. As he wrote not fo r a Sarna audience, but fo r

one that was Dutch, he alse expended some effort to describe who "the Badjau" were and

who they were not. The tenor of these efforts reveal a rather romantic view of the Badjau

as a simple fo lk, a view I am tempted to call a coastal zone variety of pastoralism, in

which he emphasizes whathe took to be their non-aggressive nature. Dutch colonials, by

contrast, were the target of his criticism and cynical asides. Burghoom reflected, for

tos This is not to imply that processes of material production and manufaaure were notalso social. The point is that Burghoom's descriptions were fo cused on an appreciation of method and the development of particularskills inpractice, all generally gearedtoward livelihood. He may have been interested in social aspectsof these, but fo r the most part. he just did not go there.

101 instance,on how .. white civilization" had an immoralview of nakedness, and his

sarcastic comments implied that it (not nakedness, but civilization) was accompanied by profuse amounts of gin. Inadd ition, he also expressed profound disapproval of how little

Dutch people in the Indies knew of Malay, a language he fo und they used in a most impertinent manner. Burghoom's view of simple sea nomads went hand in hand with a sense that civilization corrupts, together comprising partof a larger perspective in which some natives, and especially those in the past, appeared to be unsullied by a modernity

106 borne presumably by colonial Europeans.

106 He ·remarks on white civilization in two places. First, when describing night fishing, for which people use light to attract the fish: " ... If all the torchesare consumed then the fish disappear. Later, when the white people {b/anke} brought civilization {beschaving}, they made torches from the great number of empty (stone) gin bottles around before long" (p.SIIX). In a less sarcastic tone, fetching water gave Burghoom an opportunity to reflect on the morality of nakedness: · Drawing water is always an agreeable occuaption ... On the way, but especially on the beach by the springs, thereis playing and romping about, and swimming and diving to see who can go the fastest or thedeepest. Boys and girls are often keen competitors with each other here. With their agility and speed it all comes easily to the totally naked children. A pair of shorts or a little skirt is just worn when thechild ren have become marriageable. It is a splendid sight to seethese bronzed naked figures shootthrough the water like fish. And to see this is a lot less immoral than the modem pick-up girl {sic., in english} in bikini or monokini. Those bikini- or monokini-girls leave to guessing what is not visible and provoke erotic thoughts. For that matter, the immorality,and with it the clothing, only came withthe whitecivil ization. It is not, then, the generalnake dness which is immoral, but it is the thought-associations (of people) that call it immoral because their own thoughts are immoral. The naked person is justas God shaped him, in His Formand Likeness. And I have seen many boys and girls completelynaked together who were much more chaste and moral than modem "civilized" people can imagine (p.2/XIV).

Pure natives; modernitycorrupts. Hence it is not so surprising that more than once in the typescript, while naked bronze bodies are not exactly eroticized - except perhaps by a sort of negative logic through an association of denial - they are nonetheless aestheticized. Sometimes, though, it must be said, denial runs deep. Take, for instance, the work of drawing water, wherehe begins this digression on moralityand nakedness. It is hard to imagine, except fo r one who does not do it,that "drawing wateris always an agreeable occupation." Living distant from freshwater, an occasion is sometimes made of excursionsfor it. However, "always agreeable" seemsto be stretchingthe denial of drudgery a bit far. Burghoom's biting remarks on Dutch useof Malay come in the contextof a fo lk etymologyhe offers for the word "bajo," which I discuss below. He states: Many "colonial" Dutch people, who, in their delusion of superiority did not take the Malaly language seriously and discriminated heavily will very likely be guiltyof the corruption badjak - badjo. It may be statedas a well-known factthat thousandsof Dutch people lived and worked in the Dutch East Indies fo r decades, but none of them learned the Malay language. What they knew of it wasa very coarse mannerin which to command the

102 The tint of nostalgia in the typescriptpossibly bears a deeper hue fo r being viewed through a retrospective lens. Andalthough we cannot be completely sure about when it was composed, the typescript's "sepia tone" may also be colored by Bughoorn's looking back across the border of an era, to the time before the colony was, as it were, lost by the Dutch. Yet romantic views of sea people as simple fo lk were also common to

European colonials. Burghoorn's views are interesting not so much fo r being cliche in this regard, but fo r how he employed such perspectives in tryingto delineate and differentiate "the Badjau" fromothers .

Beforewe delve into that, just to recap, the typescript is made up of the fo llowing: a collection of quite richly descriptive technical passages about native industry, which are hung on a narrative frame that re-presents a story he heard about a princess lost at sea, along with a fe w scattered remarks that shed light on his nostalgia for uncorrupt natives and on his critical disdain fo r "white civilization." Burghoorn also provides a very brief pseudo-historical introduction as well as analytical digressions that aim to help the reader distinguish "the Badjau" from others with whom they might be confused. His primary

servants, and this, in a pseudo-Malay with many, verymany corrupted Dutch words. By this utter lack of contact, and also tact. it seems to mean inexpressible treasure of old refined culture has been lost" (p. l a/8).

The fa ct that Burghoom singles out "culture loss" as an effect of this coarse usage indicates something of his own nostalgic concerns and, lingering in the background, the question of what "contact" is, or was. In addition, the comment that "old refined culture... has been lost" may also relate to his would­ be anthropological scholarlyyearnings. Compare the passage in his Jetter to Noorduyn:

And whether it would now still be possible tomake importantobserva tions, I highly doubt it. J have heard thatpeople have in any casewanted toconvert the Sea-Dayaks to Islam byfo rce and to fully integrate (them) in the 'indigenous' population. If there is still something to be saved [redden] then to me this appearsto be on the coasts of Celebes. Peoplethere have in every respect always been more tolerant than in many other parts ofIndonesia.

While his use of the verb "save" is ambiguous here, in thecontext of this letterand his prior apologies in it fo r the lack of an unscientific approach, the term appears basically to bean appeal for salvage ethnography.

103 means of drawing such distinctions is through fo lk etymology, yet the supposed trait of non-agressivity also remains important in this endeavor, as we shall see below.

In an effort to disentanglethe welter of similar sounding terms, Burghoorn takes

7 pains to elucidate the finer points of difference between bad}au, batjo, and badjo. 10

Badjau, the name by which he knewthese sea people, was not the same as batjo: "the

Makassarese term for 'youth,' in the same spirit as the word 'djongos' on Java."1 08 These youth, or batjo, he explained, were utilized as stevedores along the inter-island trade routes at stops that did not have proper ports. 109 Even though Badjau and batjo were not the same, as both were sea people of a sort, they were often, he explains, confused by

outsiders. "Badjo," he goes on to elucidate, is a combination of these two terms - Bad}au and batjo -and one which he had seen on maps, although he "never saw a combination

11 of these two wholly different people." 0 This is one of only two places in the entire typescript where he mentions the term "badjo." In the other, rather than explaining it as a combination of terms, he instead offers that, '"badjo' could be of a wholly different origin. Presumably this name is a corruption of the Malay word 'bajalt = pirate." This presumed shift, or "corruption" (verbastering), of the word fo r pirate is one he basically

111 blames on the careless pronunciation of Malay by the Dutch.

Burghoorn's explanations of the termbadjo - first as a combination of the name

Badjau and the Makassarese term for "youth" (batjo), and second as a Dutch bastardization of the Malay word for "pirate" (badjak) - situate "badjo" as a term of mere

107 In contemporary spelling, batjo = baco and badjo = bajo. 108 Burghoorm, p.J a/8. 109 He furthermentions that this small-scale trade was carried by natives on cargo ships or laadbolen (Burghoom, p. 4/X). From the Dutch (s ingular) laadboot, this appears to be the source of the term fo r a oarticular typeof cargo boat, a perahu lamhoq,or ld"boq, common to South and Southeast Sulawesi. 10 · , Burghoom, p. 4/X. 111 Burghoom, p. 1 a/8. See note 109above.

104 confusion, and one that does not, in practice, referto any actual social group. This is quite

surprising, for it implies that Burghoorn himselfthen had littleenough command of non-

Sarna local languages to know that badjo or "Bajo" was a common exonym used to refer

112 to Sarnapeople.

At least as remarkable as this ignorance of how badjo was used in local practice is

a kind of sin of omission: the term "Sarna" appearsnowhere in Burghoorn's

113 manuscript. As Burghoorn moves beyond mere fo lk etymology in his effort to

distinguish "the Badjau" fromthe historical pirates of the region, one might expect at

least to see the variant "Samal'' - as in the notorious Balangingi Sarnal pirates of the

114 southern Philippines. Yet, since neither "Sarna" nor "Sarnal" appear in the typescript,

112 On my firsttrip to Kendari, Southeast Sulawesi in 1990, local (non-Sama) people were quick to correct my pronunciation to conform with local usage: i.e., "Bajo." But perhaps Burghoom was not in situations where others were likely to correct him, especially ifthey fo und it more convenient to simply put up with the funny pronunciations of a Dutchman. In the contemporaryre gional dialects oflndonesian throughout Sulawesi, "Bajo" is the exonym presently in use. "Bajo" (�A .....) also appears in Bugis-language manuscripts of the I 8th and 19th centuries and possibly earlier as well. In Makassarese it is often "bayo," and appears (with some importance) in theChron icles ofGowa. Sometimes, instead, they were referred to in Makassareseas turije'ne'- "peopleof the water." Burghoom may have spent mostof his time in northern Sulawesi, although he clearly made it as farsouth as the Salabangka islands in what is now the northern reaches of offshore Southeast Sulawesi. It is possible that he just may not have spent much time in communities where "Bajo" was theterm of reference, despitethe political and numerical dominance of the Bugis in Sulawesi's southwestern peninsula and the existence ofBugis trading communities in many areas outside of it. This would help explain Burghoom's ignorance ofthe exonym "Bajo" (although not only the Bugis used it). Also, if it was the case that he spent most of his time in the island's northern peninsula, this could be another factorthat might also help clarityhis ignoranceof the term "Bajo." Since the Sama population there is relatively sparse, there could have been Jess reference to them, in other words, fe wer occasions fo r it, in the languages ofnon-Sama people there. This thinner distribution of Sarna people in north Sulawesi is probably a resultof the intensityof piracyand slave raidingin theSulu Sea region in the late 18th and19 th centuries. 113 European and North American scholars have mostly only begun to use the autonym "Sarna"over the past fifteento twentyyears, and more regularly in roughly the past fiveto ten. In Indonesia, only a fe w highly educated peopletried to correct mypronunciation of the exonym "Bajo" so that it accorded with the term theyknew, "Bajau." This implied to me thatthey were fa miliar with thisterm through referential practice in European written sources, or, more likely, in Indonesian-language sources where such practices were reproduced. For someone to correct me in this way indicated that they were unfamiliar with actual referential practice in contemporary Sulawesi and its environs and certainlyhad littleor no substantial interaction with Sarna people,who, when speaking in Indonesian, oftenrefer tothemselves as "Bajo." Vosamer(1 839) used "Badjo." "Badjo" and"Bad jau" are (respectively) possibly of Spanish and Portuguese derivation, although a Bugis derivation of"bajo" is also a possibility. 114 James Warrenhas writtencopiously on theBalangingi Samal (inter alia 1971, 1978, 1981, 2002).

105 ------· ·------

Bughoom obviously has no concernabout wrongly equating them or how to differentiate

them. Rather, he makes a case against confusing "the Badjau" with the "Badj ogubang,11

"Badj ogubang" being one of the names he attributes, along with "Magindanao's," to

fo rmerpirates of the southern Philippines

In making his case fo r the difference between "the Badjau" and these pirates from

the Southern Philippines, Burghoom asserts that the Badj au are peaceable (vreedzame).

"Not that they are not eminent fighters, on the contrary. But they are not aggressive."1 15

He was very invested in this view of the peaceable Badjau, so much so that he uses it as

partof his argument to distinguish the Badjau frompirates, as we see in the fo llowing

passage where he treats a story of Sarna dispersal from Johor as fact.

That the notorious pirates were named 'Magindanoa's' {sic.} as well as 'Badjogubang,' can have given rise to the notion that they would also be descendants of the Badjau's of Johor. But they are anthropologically {sic.} wholly different and have a very divergent form. Also they speak a language, probably "Tagala" that in no part resembles the Badjau language. The language spoken by the "real" Badjau's reminds one of a dialectin the Komerin-district of South Sumatra. Further, their whole way of acting [that of the pirates], their manner of sea travel, their boat construction and aggressiveness differ so strongly from the real Badjau that I cannot accept that they ever would have belonged to this group. 116

What Burghoom argues is thaton the basis of boat construction, aggressiveness

and physical form (elsewhere he explains that the Badjau are pigeon-toed), he cannot

115 "In sommige boeken wordt gesproken van een Badjaugroep die naar de Philipijnen zou zijn getrokken. Van hier uit zouden zij aanva/len gedaan hebben op de kusten en ei/anden van de Minqhasa en de westkust van Celebes tot aan Tolito/i toe. Maar zulke verhalenpassen in het geheel niet in het karakter van de vreedzameBadjau's. Niet dat zijgeen uitstekende vechters zijn, integendeel. Maar zijzijn niet � ressief " Burghoorn p. l all. 11i Burghoom, p. Ia/2-3. Actually, I find that all thedialects ofSama language I have ever heard sound more like Tagalog than like any dialect of Malay or Indonesian I've encountered. There is, however, quite a bit of variation in the pronounciation ofSarna dialects. In Badjoe, for instance,on thecoast of the Bugis region of Bone, finalvowe ls, elsewhereopen, clearand distinct, oftenten ded toward the Bugis schwa or e­ pepet (includingthe final vowel in thename "Sarna"). Sarna language in Bajoe sounded very Bugis­ influencedto my ears. Yet even from one end of theStraits of Tiworo to the other thereare variations. I had, for instance, learned /si:sil/ as the word fo r "mosquito" in Tiworo's eastern end, but was later teased at the other end of the Straits fo r not pronouncing it as /si:sel/.

106 accept that the so-called "Badjogubang"pirates share a common descent with those he considered the "real" Badjau (firstwith scare quotes and then without). It is also important to note here how Burghoorntries to use the issue of language to bolster his argument. He is almost certainly wrong about what pirates from the southernPhil ippines spoke - it was probably not Tagala (Tagalog). More importantly, though, what

Burghoorn states about the language spoken by the Badjau suggests that he, himself, may not have been able to speak with them in their own language. The statement that it,

"reminds one of a dialect spoken in ... South Sumatra," is rather slippery. Did it just sound similar to his ears? What basis was there for the likeness? While it is difficultto tell what linguistic proficiency he may have had in Sarna, his argumentdistinguishing the

Badjau language from that supposedly used by pirates from the Southern Philippines has an altogether different and important rhetorical effect: it points to a location in South

Sumatra - close to Johor -that implicitly substantiates the tale of dispersion fromJohor that he re-presents.

In what language did Burghoorncommunic ate with "theBad jau"? It is hard to know, for in addition to the near absence of writing about "thesocial," thereare almost no instances in which Burghoorndescribes his owninterac tions with them. Although, as he says, he often came in contact with the Badjau and even, as is obvious from his descriptivepassages, spent considerable time with them, the sorts of things to which he explicitly attests are, for themost part, notsocial relations, let alonethose involving himself. Rather, he explicitly bears witness to, for instance, a certain practice or skill, a processes of manufacture, a stunning location, or a particular delicacy. Despite his

107 contact with them, thereis reallyonly one instance in the typescriptthat shows him

squarely placing himselfwithin Bad jau social space. 117

This is the singularpoint at which Burghoom becomes present as a character in

the story he narrates. It is the scene in which he actually hears the tale of a Badjau

princess swept away in a stonn and how the search for her leads to the dispersion of the

Badjau throughout the archipelago and in particular to the Salabangka islands - where he

hears it. His presence in the scene lends it the authority of witness, a realistaut horitythat

seems to seep over to the story he hears. 118 Burghoom uses this story to frame the rest of

117 There is one other place where he describeshis interactions with the Badjau, however, it does not situate him within their social space. Nonetheless, it i� a telling illustration of how their boats were utilized for short-distance transportation as a fo rm of statute labor: Once an Indonesian {sic.}official in the Dutch (colonial) service tried to tum them into fa rmers. This man, himself coming from the "agrarian Buginese," considered anyone who was not a farmer a vagrant. This in contrastto the seafaring Buginese fromthe coastal regions. It led to a huge fiasco. Luckily a Dutch civil servant intervened (in a) timely (manner) and it was decided that the Badjau's not only could not be fo rced to do agriculture but that they should be allowed to perform their statute labor (herendiensten) at sea. And ultimately the Badjau's were a very small percentage of thewhole population. Thus it was decided that the Badjau's would only performstatute labor if a civil servant needed to be moved along the coast and there was no longer anotherway (to go). Sometimes for small crossings from one island to another. I stayedseveral times in these regionswhich had the size of a fe w Dutch Provinces but where at the most (there) were only two civil servants. For longer distances these (two civil servants)preferred to wait fo r a better, motorized connection. This passage describes a specifically colonial sort of interaction in which Sarna labor was occasionally utilized for short-distance coastal transportation. It wasnot, I would argue, an instance of Burghoom's participating in their social space. By thisI of course do not mean to imply that these spaces are mututally exclusive. It is more a question of which framescan and do predominate in an interaction. Speaking more generally of statute labor in these parts, Burghoom said that it was paid, but that people had little desire to work for a wage since food was plentiful. He furthermore explained that it was possible to arrange for one person tosubstitute for another, with the resultthat some people made a kind of calling of such work (p. 1/11 - 3111). It is only later in thetypescript that Burghoom actuallymentions thathe oftenutilized this sort

of labor arrangement for coastal transportation: " ..•daar ik als opzichter Landschapswerken in die omgeving vee/gebruik maakle van hun prauwen" (p. 5/X). 118 There is a tension betweenrealism and fantasy in the piece. For instance, the aims of his very brief "historical" introduction (which starts with Srivijaya) asserts a connection between the lost Badjau princess and a late 181h centuryattempt, purportedlyby theSultan of Bone, to put a Bone prince (her grandson) on the Johor throne. The attempt fa iled - the "brave(Dutch)Capt ain J. van Braam" lifted the seige, but the point is that,according to Burghoomand his understanding of thestory he heard, the claimant was the grandsonof thisBad jau princess and his claim went (lineally) through her. Burghoom reckons that this lineage was thus a "lesser line" ofJohor. His brief argument aboutmale royal succession, which strikes one as a very Dutch colonial sortof concern, only appears in his introduction, however, and it is impossible to know whether or not it was actually part of the story he heard. His argument in this introduction is,

108 his material, yet the setting in which he hears it and where he is present as more than just

a narrator itself serves to frame that narrative frame, surrounding it in the rhetoric of this-

happened-to-me.

Burghoom presents this scene in a section titled: "First Meeting." Looking back

on those days when he travelled around the east coast of Celebes he explains that he

slowly became better acquainted with these sea people,

And aftera fe w months of associating with them they became rather more obliging, especially with their narratives. I noted that if, at sea, they were ever unexpectedly overtaken by a storm, they would shout at their loudest: 0, Princess Papu, please help your children! And so I wondered who indeed this Princess Papu should be, who helps them out in time of need. Was she a Dewi, a Goddess? And one day, on a splendid moonlit evening when the full moon hung like a fireball in the heavens, I sat with them on the shore of one of the islands in the fantastically beautiful Salabangka Archipelago on the southeast coast of Celebes. An impressive evening in an impressive place on the beach. An evening that cannot be described, (but) which one could only "live to see," which could only be "experienced." And on this solemn evening, in this nearly sacred place, I heard as the first, and probably also the only white person, the 119 story of Princess Papu.

Inthis cliche setting of would-be colonial ethnography Burghoom pt.:.imes readerthe to

fo llow a series of scenes dispersed throughout the typescript in which he tells his

rendition of the tale he heard.

nonetheless, delivered in the register of the real. Contrast this with his admission to Noorduyn that his typescript is not scientific but has become just "an ordinary story," and with the flavor of the princess story itself as a kind of legend or fa iry tale (a point I take up toward the end of the chapter). The tension between realism and fantasy also permeates his description of the Salabangka islands: In these gorgeous surroundings the Badjau chose their place of abode. The crystal clear water is a deep blue color and runsto emerald green toward the shallows and the coasts. This splendor of colors, seen in the harsh light of the tropical sun and with the grey-white background of the islands' bluffs, totally devoid of vegetation, give to this group(of islands) a more than fairy-likebeaut ifulimage. An image that in its realityfa r surpasses fantasy.The outcrops {uitlopers} of these rock formations, which sometimes ended up in thin shoals on the beaches, were also gloriously beautiful. And striking against these outcrops with a piece of iron, one gets a sound like that of a church clock, and each outcrop gives a different pitch. One fancies oneself really in a fa irylandthere {p. I /XIV). 119 Burghoom, pp.3-4/II. He does not say much more about it than this. No description of the person telling the story,no mention of song, no mention of audience other than himself.

109 In some versions of this tale the woman is called puteri raja bajo, the daughter of a Bajo ruler or king, in some she is thedaughter of a Sultan, while in others, with slightly less grandiosity, she is simply the daughter of a chief. Burghoom translates ''puteri"as

11princess," and appearsto take "Papu'' as her proper name. While ''puteri"can mean

"princess.'' it also means "daughter," a daughter of someone respected or high-status. To translate puteri as 11princess" in this case renders "Puteri Papu" -as Burghoom seems to think - as a princess who is named "Papu," when in fact what it means is "the daughter of

Papu." That Burghoom did not get this is clear fromtwo things: when referring to her father in the story,he only uses a title andnever a name; and second, "Papu," as it happens, is the name of her father in other versions. 120

The social stature of this father figure is relativelyconsistent throughout the versions: he is referred to as a chief, a sultan, a raja, with the· Bugis title puwang, and in some cases with the Sarna-language title for highborn Sarnapeop le: lolo.121 Yet while such titles all consistently refer to a high status person, the way they refer to place is much less regular. In most ofthe stories the father and daughter hail either from Johor

(sometimes more broadly the Malay peninsula), or Luwuq, an old kingdom at the head of the Gulf of Bone in Sulawesi. They do thus associate Sarna pasts with the sites of prestigious fo rmerkingdoms, and sometimes his title makes it seem like they ruled such places. For instance, inboth Burghoom's story and in a brief attested version I examine

120 And nowhere else is the daughter referred to as "Papu." This observation raises the need fo r a second look at Bughoom's scene of story-witness. If it wasactua lly the case that Burghoom heard someone at sea in a storm yell "0, Papu!" -as I once heard someone in the field describe - rather than "0, Puteri Papu," then thatperson was callingout to her fatherand not to the daughter. "0, Puteri Papu!" would be a mouthfulin a time of crisis. It is possible thatBurghoom mayhave projected his incorrect understanding of "Papu" as herproper name back onto a recollection he had of hearing thisname invoked during rough seas. It is also possible that he indeed heard "Puteri Papu" invoked, and that other Sarna people in later years simply invoked "Papu." . 121 "Lolo" in some versions is also used to referto the daughter. At points it appears to be not just a title but her name, something I discussfurther below.

110 below, the father's title,ref erringdirectly to a particularplace, is simply the "Sultan of

Johor."

Yet in other versions the father's title refers primarily to a social group ("the

Bajo"}, and place is decidedly secondary. In the Lemobajo manuscript,for instance, he is referred to as "the puwang of the Bajo (who) also lived in Mangkuttu."122In this case his title refers to authorityover certain people but not over a territocyor even a vaguely demarcated realm. In this and similar instances, place is decoupled from the idea of a collectivity, and as a result, the title remains resistantto the sort of slippage that equates territories with social bodies. The phrase "the leader of the Bajo in x-place" also implies that theremay be leadersof Bajo people inother places as well as leaders of other descent groups in roughly the same place.It reminds us, as does the sheer varietyof placesfrom which the stories say this father and daughter hail, that such narratives do not depict Sarnapeople in a u-topic sea but show them attached to various coastal locations where Sarna supposedly lived.

If the places these two figureshail fromis inconsistent fromone version to another, though, there is even greatervariety to wherethe daughter in them winds up.

What is one to make of all this toponymic fluidity, especially when the stories share certainstructural similaritiesacro ss vecy different versions?

In the next sectionof thechapter I look comparativelyat some different, and for the most partbrief , versions ofthe tale in which a high-status Sarnawoman starts offin one place and ends up inanother. In these tales, herrelocation has implications for

122 The fullline reads: "Naia puwanna Bajoe, kuwa mutopi marenreng ri Mangkuttu l"iparasengengngi I Papu, anaqna riaseng I Lolo." "The Bajo puwang also lived in Mangkuttu. He was named I Papu and his child named I Lolo." "LB Lemobajo," p. 3. Mangkuttku is in the realm of Luwuq in Sulawesi!; below we shall see how this is utilized in the narrative of themanuscript version from Lemobajol.

Ill collective movement and is always causally linked to Sarna interactions with other, non-

Sarna, people. I group these tales together with a couple of stories that do not have a woman at their center, as part of a larger set of stories in which Sarna people explain how they got "here" - wherever here is - from somewhere else.

Stories of Flight and Accidental Travel

Strewn across the archipelago, yet with nowhere taken fo r granted as a point of collective diaspora, Sarnapeople frustrated colonial projects to order knowledge of ethnic difference through metonymies of people and land. Perceived as lacking a homeland, or at any rate lacking one that was ideologically naturalized, the matter of"Badj au" origins became something of a mystery waiting to be solved. Like a nagging hangover from the nineteenth century, a concern withtheir origins has driven observersto seek fo r evidence of such a place in Sarna stories of relocation.123 As though "who arethe Badjau?" had an answer in addressing the question ••where arethey from?" and closely on the heels of this question, that of how - the presumption went - theywere cast adrift. Yet Sarna stories of

123 Frake ( 1980: 320) makes a similar point about people turningto their narratives in order to findclues to Sarna "origins." He states that the lack of a clear designation of locality in their ethnonyms "suggests a remote and mysterious provenance appropriate to a wandering people" and "makes of ethnicorigins a puzzle, a propertop ic for a myth." Usefully,he goes on to mention that such myths are entrenched as history in thescholarly literatureand inthe lore andannals of local states: "Wherethe Sama/Bajau come fromis a question whose response always points to somewhere else, somewhere famous. Usually that place is Johor. In south Celebes, Borneo and Sulu thesemyths have become partof regionalpolitical systems, written down in Bugis and Sulu aMals, asaccounts of the social positions of the Sarna in local systems." Unfortunately, Frake givesno indication whatsoever for wherehe came by this information on Borneoand Celebes, and gives absolutely no references to any "aMals" (nor any descriptions of them) in which Sarna myths have been taken up as history. It is a pitythat he did not discuss the matter further in any specificity. His point about myth being turned into history is an important one which I take up below. Yet it does not address one of the most crucial aspects of how a "past" is created, namely how and why these stories have had a vibrant ongoing life in manuscript and oral formswithin Sarna social contexts, and away from the centers ofthese various political systems. (Cf.: Cummings 2001b which examines tales from relatively marginalMakassarese realmsthat effectively contest theauthority of a single, once powerful Makassarese kingdom, Gowa.)

112 the past encountered in different places offer conflicting information about the locations from which either they, or their once-upon-a-time elites, had come. This conflicting information about place (among other things) casts doubt on whether, or in what ways, one might regard such stories as historical discourse. Even if one considers these tales as

"myths," though, one calls them "origin stories" at the peril of missing what they are about.

They are not origin stories. For one thing, none of these stories explains the fo unt of Sarna being in the world, nor where, mythically speaking, it took place. Unlike, fo r instance, the myth of dynastic origins in the La Ga/igo tales of South Sulawesi, these

Sarna stories do not reveal anything about the origination of an elite Sarna lineage, nor from whence it sprang - whether on earth, below the seas, or in the heavens. What nearly all these tales of the past do address is the implicit question of how "we" Sarna people got

"here" from somewhere else.

Sometimes the stories presume an awareness of Sarna people asa dispersed collectivity and also address the more general question of Sarna dispersion as part of a response to that of how "we" got "here." Yet in providing "answers" to these questions, they never markthe previous location as a collective "homeland." Hence, it is also not quite right to call this knowledge of Sarna dispersion a "diasporic consciousness," fo r the stories do not associate dispersal with movement away from a singular taken-for-granted 4 place of "origin." Such a place, fo r Sarna people, does not exist. 12 Yet Sarna people are

124 In fact, numerous Sarnapeople over the years have presumed that the discoveryof such a place was the aim of my research. I repeatedly had to disabuse people of this notion, and regularly turned the question back on them to ask what they thought about where Sarna people came from. Responses usually did not elicit these stories. Rather, these stories emerged in relation to questions about "the past" and "history."

113 keenly awareof their distributionover a wide area, and stories of the past often address how maritime relocation took place.

If these stories of the past are not "originstori es," but they do address a movement from one place to another, are they, then, "migration narratives"? Some groups in upland

Southeast Asia have migration narratives which map out their histories in relation to the landscapes through which they and previous generations have moved (Rosaldo 1980,

Tsing 1993, Metcalf2002). Like migration narratives, Sarnatales of the past describe a shiftof locale. Also like migration narratives they hint at a relationship between place and the imagination of a collective past that is quite different fromthat of diaspora, which continually refers group "identity" back to a singular place. Yet unlike migration narratives of upland SoutheastAsia, these storiesof the Sarnapast do not link together a chain of movements, and unlike manymigration narr atives theyare not set in remembered historical time.

While we cannot really call them either "origin stories" or "migrationnarr atives" then, these Sarnastories of the past do nonetheless generally address the matter of how

"we" got "here," as well as, sometimes,the wider condition of dispersal, by explaining the circumstances thatled to relocation. In other words, the stories point to the conditions that supposedly caused Sarnato relocate, and in some cases also caused them to disperse.

Indeed, hearing someone say, " .. and that's how we came to be scattered," at the end of a verybrief version once provideda usefullyunambiguous framefo r one such story's significance. A remark like this is not usually necessary,though, since the concern with relocation and dispersion is generallyevident from the thrust of the contents.

114 One finds snippets of such stories about Sarna relocation and dispersion attested

t t t in the 18h, 19h and 20 h century literature on the region. Below I consider some of these

short tales of the Sarna past attested in the literature, before turning back to Burghoorn

and the version familiarin parts of Southeast Sulawesi and its environs.

A number of brief tales attested from the northern regions of Sarna distribution

trace the presence of Sarna people in the Sulu archipelago of the Southern Philippines

(Pollet 1945: 129-30; Nimmo 2001: 22-4) and in Borneo, or present day Easterm

Malaysia (Sopher 1965 : 141-2; Forrest 1780: 372; Rutter 1922: 73; Yap 1978: 9) and

Kalimantan (Dewall 1885: 446-7), to a departure from the prestigious fo rmer Malay

kingdom of Johor. While Johor and the Malay peninsula regularly appear in these stories,

though, one does not always find a "princess" or a high status woman mentioned in them.

Below I describe two of these stories, which each revolve around the figure of a woman,

and fo llowing a discussion of these I describe two versions of a Sarna relocation tale in

which no woman appears. In the firsttwo stories, the move to relocate is a repurcussion

of the theft of a high-status daughter.

Helen Pollet, in 1945, encountered a story that went like this: centuries ago these

peaceful fishermen, afraid of the shore fo lk, dwelt in boats offthe coast of the Malay

Peninsula. The beautiful daughter of their chief was stolen and taken away by the chief of

the shore people, but she escaped and returned to her father's boat. Afraid of revenge, the

Badj aus decided to let the next big gale take them where it would, and as a result they

wound up in the Sulu Sea and made it their new home (Pollet 1945:129-130 in Sopher

1965: 145). This story explains how Sarna people came. to be in the Sulu archipelago.

They did not pick this destination, but the decision to leave where they had been living

115 was quite intentional. In addition, the storyillu strates collective flightacross the water as an acknowledged response to fear of retaliation, a retaliation that they expected when the taking of a woman backfired. In other words, because this Sarna womangot away, her kindred fe ared attempted reprisals by members of the group fromwhom she escaped. 125

In another storyof relocation, recorded by Rutter in North Borneo in 1922, the high status Sarna woman at the center of the tale was said to be the Johor Sultan's daughter. Both the ruler of Sulu and that of Brunei fell in love with her. She was sent off to Sulu to marrythe better match, accompanied by a strong escort and war boats. The

Brunei prince, however, led out his fleet, attacked theJohor boats and took the princess.

The Johor peopledreaded the thought of either going on to Sulu, or going back to Johor.

So they cruised the seas, picking up a living as best they could. Some, Rutter tells us, eventually fonnedpiratical communities on the coasts ofNorthBorneo (Rutter 1922: 73 in Sopher 1965:142). This storyexplains relocation from Johorto the coasts ofNorth

Borneo. The final note regarding piratical communities may well have been added by

Rutter who shared the British North Borneo Company's long-standing concerns with the persistence and suppressionof piracy. 126

Like the version recorded by Follet, this one also poses collective flighton the sea as a response to thetheft of a high-status woman. In Follet's version collective flightwas a result of her escape and fearof retaliationby her erstwhilecaptors; the group fled together, by happenstance, to the Sulu Sea. In contrast, the storyrecorded by Rutter

125 The "kidnap" or taking of a Sarna woman, her unnegotiated marriageto an outsider, and collective flight for fe ar of reprisals whenthings go awry, isnot, apparently, unique to Sarnastories of the mythic past. A similar sort of situation came up in recollections of eventsin Tiworo in the 1950's. This demonstrated to me the continued relevance of such stories for Sarna people, and(contra Cummings 200 I b) it flies in the face of the notion that as co�nter-historical discourse,·suchtales draw on stories about kinship as mere metaphor. For a discussion of these events in the 1950's, see chapter 6 below. 126 The British North BorneoCompany actively settled and "pacified" the Bajau (Warren 1971).

116 presents captors who were successful, and it is not their retaliation that is feared. Rather,

because her escort failed to prevent her theft, those in it decide neither to return to Johor nor to go on to Sulu, but instead disperse to the shores of North Borneo in order, presumably, to avoid the responses of her kin and those of the intended groom.

It is important to point out that in these stories, the theft of a women means that there was no marriage negotiation. Such negotiations are, among other things, an occasion for the kin of each side to formally recognize the status claims of the other.

Recognizing such status claims this way in social practice reproduces their legitimacy not just among Sarna people but also, when others are involved, within wider networks of social meaning and interaction. To steal a high status woman is, in effect, a tool of subordination, not simply because it is a violent assertion of dominance, but also because it is a refusal to negotiate and mutually confer such recognition. It is both repudiation and snub delivered in the starkest of terms. Where the possibility of negotiation is disallowed, either status claims are denied or there is simply no formal recognition of them in social practice. Since marriages (when negotiated) link not just individuals but kin groups, and since status is largely ascribed or based on lineage, an unnegotiated marriage does not permit mutual recognition of lineal status claims, and the theft of a woman implies not only her subordination, but also that of her kin.

While in both of the above stories, the theftof a woman leads eventually to relocation, the way it works in each storyis different. In the first one, after the woman escapes her captors, the entire community flees for fear of revenge. Yet, why do they fear revenge? We are not told, for instance, that she or her kin have killed someone. So the logic by which her escape would incur the other group's revenge does not, therefore,

117 ------�·--··

fo llow a retributive calculus of settling scores. Rather, their retaliation is fe ared as

punishment fo r her escape and as a lesson in social position. By "retaliating," her captors

would reassert that position of impunity and dominance they presumed to have by taking

her in the first place. Flight by her people avoids physical peril and also evades the

attempt to reinscribe their subordination on the social body.

In the second story,the Johor Sultan's daughter, on her way to a negotiated match

in Sulu, is stolen from her escort by the Brunei Sultan's fleet. The escort, which failed to

prevent her theft, prefers not to return to her fa ther, the Sultan in Johor, nor to go on to

Sulu where they are expecting her arrival. Is the escort then ashamed of their fa ilure? Do

they fear punishment at either end? We are not told. Yet their fa ilure to prevent her theft

is serious enough to warrant that they neither return, nor continue to their destination, but

instead disperse. In effect, her theft and their fa ilure to prevent it causes their flight. Her

theft, one can imagine, would have political implications. One may think of it this way: if

a union of marriage negotiated between two Sultans is a matter of both mutual

recognition and good marriage politics, then the theft ofthe bride by a third party sends a

potentially demeaning political message. The "union" brought about by such a theft

might link Johor to Brunei as kin of a sort. But it withholds fromJohor the respect of

fo rmal recognition achievedthrough the practice of negotiating. In effect, it signals that

the Brunei Sultan does not have to negotiate with that of Johor, and thus implies the

latter's subordination. Little surprise, then, that fai ling to prevent his daughter's theft, the

escort would decide not to return to Johor.

These two brief tales of relocation conjurea view of the past set neither in a world

of ethnic isolation, nor one in which there is a single locus of dominant authority against

118 which less powerful others both struggle and measure themselves. Rather, these two brief tales suggest a wider archipelagic social field in which relations between various descent groups may be quite fraught, in which the Sarnaappear as potentially subordinate, and in which flight is an acknowledged way out of situations that are both demeaning and dangerous.

In contrast with stories that have such social rationales fo r collective relocation are tales in which relocation is caused by sheer coincidence. The reason fo r moving to a new place, in other words, is based on an utterly accidental, if sometimes extraordinary, occurrence. Arlo Nimmo presents the texts of two similar but brief legends in which

Sarna people are transported to a new location wholly by accident. In one story, the

. people stick their mooring stakes into the seabed in order to prepare fo r a storm or strong winds; the other story begins similarly, with only the chief setting his stake and all their boats tied to his. Their stakes - or stake, in the latter case - plunge not into the seabed, but go instead into a giant stingray that takes them, while they sleep, to the Sulu archipelago (Nimmo 2001: 22-23). Here the entire story about how they came to Sulu has no social impetus whatsoever. Their leaving and their arrival are completely non­ intentional; indeed, they are mere coincidence.

Despite the absence in these stories of a high status Sarna woman, I include them here since they are also about relocation. In addition, they allow me to draw attention to the use of coincidence as a literary device. Dumb luck doesn't go very fa r in the world of historical explanation, but on the sea of story, chance can be a key element of a plot. As we will see below, the causally linked events of a storyline may be set in motion by a chance occurrence. The fact that coincidence causes unintentional consequences affects

119 the narrative possibilities of how these versions unfold, as well as the ways in which one

may, or conversely may not interpret them. Coincidental causation is, however, not only

an important literary device in the more elaborate tales of the Sarna past. It also provides

a way of euphemizing the subordinating implications·ofunnegotiated marriage, a point I

will expand on at length below.

Coincidence and Euphemism in the Other Side of the Story

Early on in my fieldwork, in fact, when I spent time in Sarna villages of Tiworo

prior to graduate school, I heard an extremely short tale of the Sarna past in which a Bajo

leader - a raja Bajo (Indonesian) or /olo (Sarna) - had a daughter who went missing at

sea. He sent his people out to find her, and that, my interlocutor quickly concluded, is

how we came to be scattered. This last remark, as mentioned above, framed fo r me in a

most succinct and direct way one aspect of the significanceof such stories as an

explanation of how Sarnapeople became dispersed in the archipelago. Like the story

heard by Rutter, this briefest of tales not only explained Sarna dispersion but also linked

it causally to a Sarna woman of high status lineage. However, whereas in the version

Rutter heard the Sultan's daughter was stolen, and in the one Follet heard a chiefs

daughter was taken but later escaped, this tale of dispersion told, in contrast, of a woman

127 who was not seized but instead went missing at sea.

127 There are numerous examples of similar stories in the literature, usually of interest to listening scholars and travellers, as mentioned in the beginning of the chapter, for the clues they seem to provide to Sarna origins. Hence Petras (I972: I 57) in BalaMipa, South Sulawesi, records a version told to him by someone Bugis in which a Johor princess lost at sea is sought by the king's servants who continue their "vie errant" without finding her, while she winds up marrying in Bone. Petras also records a version in Kambuno, an island in the western Gulf of Bone. about a Bajo princess from Aceh winding up in Luwuq. I ·spent time with some ofthe same informants in 2000, which I discuss in the next chapter. Here I will just say that I

I20 Subsequent inquiry as we ll as later reading turnedup versions of what I would

call the other side of this story. In these versions, it is her story - the story of the woman

who goes missing at sea - her relocation, rather thanthat of the group, that is launched by

accidental travel. Moreover, the storyline actually fo llows what happens to her. In these

versions of the Sarna past, the outcome of her accidental voyage is a literally an

unconscious arrival and then marriage to royalty of another descent group. Her arrival is

not just unplanned as a result of her accidental voyage. Rather, her boat is either

encountered at sea with her in it unconscious or it washes up on shore with her barely

able to stake it securely before it before succumbing insensate to exhaustion. In all three

of the versions I explicitly draw on below (the oral Sama-language version from Tampo,

the Bugis-language manuscript version in LB Lemobajo, and Burghoom's version), after a

very long time at sea, people in the place of her arrival first "encounter .. her when she is

suspect, as Pelras himself did, that at certain points they may have been toying with him; this may also have been one of those points. Another version (Treefers: 1914 in Pelras 1972: 164) has Sarna arriving from the Philippines to "Takatidung." This could mean "Tidung atoll" (taka in Malay/Indonesian). I discuss the significance of"Tidung" below. Von Dewall (1855: 446-7) states that the Badjau originated in Johor and tells a similar story. In this case, the people were not afraid to return but rather no longer knew the way back. Although he was reporting on the Northeast Borneo coast and in part, on the presence there of Badjau people, it is not clear whether this version is from thatarea:

De badjau {sic.} zijn van djohor.schen oor.sprong. Eene djohorsche prinses was op zeetogt door storm verslagen geworden. De su/than van Dj ohor zond eene menigte volks uit om hoar op tesporen. Daar de verlorene prinee.s {sic.} evenwel niet werd wedergevonden, en de uitgezondenen reeds ver van Dj ohor verwijderd waren, zoodat zij den {sic.} terugweg niet meer wisten, be.sloten zij zich neder te zetten op de ku.sten van Borneo en Celebes, en de groep Solokhs. De meesten woonen op het solokhsche eiland Dinawan {Palawan?}. Zij zijn over het algemeen de eilandbewoners van Borneo 's noordoostkust. In mei /849 /cwamen 18 badjau­ praauwen zich van Dinawan op Poelau-pandjang nederzetten en zouden de overigen, sterk 50 praawen, zich eveneens op de eilanden van Berou komen vestigen ....In Boeloengan wonen geene badjaus, wei in Berou.

The narrative frame usedby Burghoom (ca. 1965) also describes a story ofBadjau dispersion from Johore. In his version there is a ')udgement" by the Sultan against the Badjau's: because of their "carelessness" in looking out fo r his daughter, they must not only search for her and may not return without finding her; they also are condemned to a life of not settling permanently on land and of making theirliving entirely from what they find at sea and on the strand. Burghoorn depicts groups of Bajo dropping offalong the way due to age, tiring and ill-health, withyounger Badjau to take care ofthem, to become a rangeof sea-related ethnic groups from Riau to Borneo to eastern Celebes.

121 not conscious. Since this accidental voyage and unconscious arrival set important

constraints on how one may understand what happens afterwards, we will look more

closely at how they each take place. As it happens, she is not transported on the back of a

giant stingray. So how does her journey begin?

The versions of the story I heard in the field, especially those fr om the Tiworo

Straits region of Southeast Sulawesi and in the Sembilan Islands of the western Gulf of

128 Bone, are similar to that fo und in the LB Lemobajo manuscript. In these versions, a

truly singular event creates the current which sweeps her boat out to sea. This event is 9 easily recognized as part of an episode from the Bugis "epic" I La Galigo.12 In this

episode, Sawerigading, the main character, also known as the Op u of Wareq, must cut

down a particular and mighty tree in order to fa shion a boat in which he will sail offto 30 "Cina."1 There he hopes to find I Cudai, a woman who looks just like his twin sister,

with whom he has fallen in love but may not marry. The tree he must fe ll, with the

128 LB Lemobajo is (or now, was), a codex of about 300 pages; roughly the first 150 of these are narrative. The rest are a collection of kotika's and other Bugis mystical and numerological sorts of diagrams. The story of the high status Bajo woman who goes missing at sea takes up only a portion of the first half of the manuscript. My purpose here is to look comparatively at this text, which is to say, this story of the high status Bajo woman, in relation to other Sarna stories of the past. It is not my aim to delve into a discussion of other sections of the codex that resemblethe Chronicle of Bone, nor to subsume this story contextually within the world ofBugis narrative,to which this episode ofthe Sarnapast appears to bear littlerela tion. On the concept of a "work" in Bugis manuscripts, see Macknight (1984). In the fo llowing chapter I discuss the Sarna social context of manuscript possession, of this mansucript in particular as well as others, including ones that are rumored to exist. Some of the practical connections between manuscript and oral versions that I heard in Sulawesi will become clearer in that discussion. Matthes (1943 [1848]: 477) mentions a Malay kotika dealing with wind and weather used by the "Badj o's" or (in Makassarese)

· "Toeridjene's "-the "people (living) on the water." 129 Both Pelras (1972: 158) and Liebner (1998: 123) reporthearing oral versions that similarly draw (to varyingdegrees) on this episode of I La Galigo. Both also visited the Sembilan Islands in the western Gulf of Bone off Sinjai: Pelrasmade a brief visit to Kambuno Island, while Liebner has spent time on Kanalo and Kambuno. Neither appears tohave spent time in Tiworo or other eastern Sulawesi areas. 13° Cina is a legendary kingdom that appears to have been located along the Cenrana River in South Sulawesi (Caldwell 1995: 410).

122 preparatory ritual help of bissu, 131 is called the welenreng tree. When it falls, all the eggs

that were in it create a floodof egg-liquids.

In LB Lemobajo and related oral versions of the Sarna past, it is this floodof egg-

liquids from the welenreng tree that sweeps her boat from Luwuq at the head of the Gulf

of Bone to land on the shores ofGowa in South Sulawesi.132 There, she is fo und by a

fisherman and brought up to the palace of the ruler, the Somba ri Gowa or Torisompae

(respectively, the "Somba of Gowa,'' or "the one to whom homage is done11). 133 In LB

Lembajo she marries him, in some oral versions, she marries );lis son. Hence, the first extant page of the manuscript134 begins:

Ia na puwanna to Wareqe, ia tona riaseng He was a Puwang135 ofthe people ofWareq, he Opunna Wareq was also called the Opu of Warek ia muto riaseng Sawerigading. and his name was Sawerigading. Naia puwanna Bajoe, kuwa mutopi marenreng It so happens a Puwang of the Bajo also lived ri Mangkuttuq at Mangkuttuq, riparasengeng ngi I Papu, anaqna riaseng his name was I Papu, and his child was I Lolo. I Lolo. Naengka seuwa wettu nauttama ri nawnawanna One day, it entered the thoughts of Opunna Wareq the Opu of Wareq maeloq e llao ri Cina pobainei anaqna to want to go to Cina to take as his wife the Opunna Cina riasennge child ofthe Opu ofCina named I Cudaiq Daeng Risompa pattellarenna. I Cudaiq, her title Daeng Risompa. Nasituru na mula puwanna to Wareqe Since she agreed, the Puwang of the Wareq riasennge Opu Senngeng mallabini people called Opu Senngeng, husband, wife massituwuseng maeloq e ritumpang and fa mily together wished firstfo r the Welenrennge ri Ussu. Welendrengtree to be cut down at Ussu. So a Narialuqna Wel enrennge ri bissu maegae. ceremonywas held by many bissu fo r the

131 Historically, bissu are crossdressingritual specialists at Bugis courts, although in I La Galigo thereis at least one instance where a female character is also a bissu: namely We Tenriabeng, Sawerigading's twin sister (Koolhof and Tol 1995: 29), referred to here as I Abeng. The classic text on bissu is Hamonic ( 1987). 2 13 The Sama-language oral version from Tampo discussed below offers the same cause fo r her accidental voyage . In this case, the teller, when asked,said the woman swept to sea came from Bajoe (rather than from Luwuq). 133 "Torisompae," Muhammad Salim pointed out, is a pseudonym for La Tenritatta Arung Palakka, the th fa med Bugis figure who helped the Dutch defeat Gowa in the 17 century. People from Tiworo were unaware of this, although a fe w did know that other sections of the lontaraq connected their past with him. 134 Most of the manuscript's leaves were stamped with a page number. Thanks to M. Salim some damaged numberless pages near the beginning were put in order; these went back as far as page three. 13� The Bugis word puwangmay be variously translated as lord, master, king, prince, father, mistress, queen, princess, mother, "of pure royal blood" (Matthes 1874: 149).

123 Napura mani rialuq, nainnappa ritumpang. Welendreng tree. It was not fe lled until after Narebbana Welenrennge, na tenrelleqna. the ceremony was completed. The Welendreng Nakkonaro riwinru ri Uriliwu. fe ll and then sank. There in Uriliu it was fa shioned [his boat]. Natepu mani naripatompo paimeng naola I Not until it was finished did it reappear from Opunna Wareq lao ri Cina. the water ridden by the Opu of Wareq to Cina. I Abeng menreq toni ri langie. I Abeng had also already returnedto the sky. Naia ri wettu nrebbana na Welenrennge When the Welendreng tree fe ll, there was a nalempeq ittellona ri Ussu, flood of egg-liquid at Ussu, nasiaccimalireng na Bajoe sibawa puwanna, and the Bajo and their Puwang were swept natabbe tona mali anaq puwanna riasennge away with the current. Also lost was his child, I Lolo. named I Lolo. Nataterre-terrena Bajoe llao sappai anaq The Bajo people scattered all over to go search puwanna. fo r their Puwang's child. Nasiareqni wenninna siareq toni essona Night and day the Bajo assappana Bajoe ri anaq puwanna searched fo r the child of their Puwang. natakkoq engkana pammasena puwang Allahu Unexpectedly, by the mercy of God the most Taala sibawa surona High and his messenger, naengkana naengkalinga Bajoe karebanna anaq the Bajo people heard news that the child of puwanna their Puwang naitte pabbelolannge ri Gowa napaenreq i ri was picked up by a fisherman in Gowa and salassaqe brought up to the palace ri Gowa, ri bolana Sombae. of Gowa, to the house of the Somba [the ruler].136

This version of the Sarnapast is thus linked to the Bugis story of I La Galigo through a nifty little prolepsis - a literary technique in which two events separated in time are connected fo r explanatory purpose in such a way as to give the impression that they occurred at the same time. In this case the prolepsis joins the story of I La Galigo, which takes place during a mythic time when ancestors of the Bugis were still descending from and ascending to the heavens, with an historical era in which Gowa is a power to be reckoned with and respected. Of course, this is not just a bringing together of events separated in time, but is, more importantly, a bringing together of stories that appear to be

136 LB Lemobajo, p.3. Opu Senngeng here is We Datu Senngeng, Sawerigading's mother (Koolhofand Tot 1995: 20-22).

124 from two quite different "literary" traditions. No other episodes from I La Galigo make 37 an appearance in LB Lemobajo. 1

In Tampo, a village on Muna Island bordering on the easternend of the Straits of

Tiworo, I encountered an oral version in which she is also swept to sea in the same

manner: by a flood ofegg -liquids, itself the result of the fe lling of the balindrah tree, as it

is called in Sarna. Here, both her landing and the fisherman's discoveryof her are not

simply mentioned but are more fullynarrat ed, thereby emphasizing the state she was in

when she was "picked up" (as LB Lemobajo has it) in Gowa. First, her boat runs aground

at Gowa:

Mandore ngge' Jagi kole na ngiramang ia There she could no longer stand the fe eling katintoroang na baka kangilantuangna nakama of tiredness and hunger, because it was not ndaka ja anu tulumbangi - tulu ngilau tetapi only three nights and days, but many nights para, bangina, bona tadampar mandore. Ngge' before she was cast ashore there. She was no lagi kole na ngusi dirina, terpaksa, alaqna ne longer able to make herself move, so was busei Samana, bona ngongsorang ia, a bobo'na fo rced to take her Sarna oar and stake it. Then ngingkatang bulu tikolo'na, bona malutang ia she tied her hair to it, and coiled it around the rna bunda lepana, masi du lubina, batuahna iru bow. And there was still more of it, meaning antara bunda lepa baka tikolo'na, bona palea. between the boat bow and her head, then she Sete/ah iru nia dakau suku Gowa a pore lay down. mamia pugelang lao bakajalana. Dumalang After that therewas a Gowa person who kitana Jelepa. "Lepa ai ko" yuqna "ore?'' "Misa went to look fo r some fo od with his net. timbauna bona pakai kamudi" yuqna. Walking, he saw a small boat. "What boat is "Kamudina pakai batah." A, patupi ia. this?" he said. "It has no topsides. And it uses a Tarintahna, e - nia manusiana, "0, matai rudder, as well as a tiller." He moved closer. kapah" yuqna. Patuku ia tarintah masi napasna. Huh?! there's someone in it. "Maybe dead" he Tarintahna ingka itu - bulu tikolo. "Taha-taha" said. He approached and he saw that she was yuqna "bulu tikolo di11da itu. Ai jana nia di"da still breathing. He noticed the rope of hair. itu. Bona malasona" qna. "Di"da tika mangga "How long" he said "the hair of this woman is! janaq" yuqna "itu." This woman is really something. And beautiful too" he said. "I wonder where this woman is Sampe ansiniangna iru palimbaq ia ka dara. from." Karna kitu ia bertindak batingga-batingga At this point he came back to the land, madialang pikirangna ore. Lapor, batuahna, ka since, he was thinking, he didn' t want to take Karaeng Gowa. just any old action. In other words, he reported Tika ia rnaistana ditilau ia ale penjaga. to the King of Gowa. "A,i" yuqna. Yuqna "Penting" yuqna "Nia na Arrivingat the palace, the guard asked:

137 Other episodes in the narrative, however, do appear to be related to the chronicle of Bone.

125 laporku ka Karaeng." "What?" "It's important" he said, "there's Yuqna "Ai na madilap omu?" something to report to the Karaeng." Yuqna ''Nia tau - (batuk)- "What do you have to report?" he said. Ngge'ne sillongah baong Mangkasarku. "There's a person -" (cough). {He shiftsfr ame:} Baongku Sarnaturus ne, a di? Sasalah jana My Makassarese isn't perfect anymore. I'll just baong Mangkasarku. Lamong baong Bugis, te, continue in my Sarna, ok? I'd mess up in my los. Makassarese. (But contraryto what you might expect) if it's Bugis, there's no limitation.138

Even in the version Burghoorn related, based on what he heard in the Salabangka

Islands offthe northeast coast of Southeast Sulawesi, the relocation of the "Badj au

Princess," Putri Papu, is accidental, and after a long time at sea, her first meeting - if one can call it that - is an unconscious one. In Burghoorn's version she is transported fr om

Johor to Bone by a storm. He explains that she is caught out in the storm basically because she was besotted by a fine new boat intended just for her. Although an experienced boater she is of tender years and lacks practice reading the signs of the weather, so that, in her pleasure out playing in the waves, she neglects to return to shore when the storm comes up and no one notices her absence until after it has passed. 139 As she drifts between the northern tip of Selayar and South Sulawesi, insensate from exhaustion, her boat is spotted and picked up by the son of the Sultan of Bone on his

"admiral ship":

Toen de Straat Selayar in zicht kwam When the Straits of Selayar came in sight, meldde de uitkijk een kleine vreemde prauw the outlook reporteda small foreign boat dead recht vooruit. Daar deze prauw voor de wind ahead. As this boat ran before the wind, they liep naderde men elkaar snel en weldra approached each other quickly, and before long herkenden de bevaren zeelui het prauw-type zo the experienced sailors recognized the boat as a

138 Lo Kadir. recordedJuly 27. 1994, Tampo, Pulau Muna, Southeast Sulawesi, transcription p. l l-12. In the column on the left, words in italics are Indonesian; the rest is Sarna. I have included the last line since it is interesting fo r two reasons. First, it seems that the teller expectedthe listeners (his nephew and myself)to expect to hear the fishennan codeswitch to Makassarese. Neither I nor his nephew had heard the story before. His remark suggests the possibilitythat in the version he is familiar with, a code switch to Makassarese took place here. The second point is a grammatical curiousity: the Sarnaparticle te indicates something that is contrary to expectations. 139 Burghoom.pp. 2/111 - 4/111.

126 als zijdat gezien hadden bij hun vaart langs de typethey had seen on their voyages along the kust van Malakka naar Johore. Dit moest dus coast ofMalakka toward Johor. This must be a een prauwuit Johore zijn,maar hoe kwam zo'n boat fromJohore, then, but how did such a kleine prauw hier in de buurt. small boat come to be in this vicinity? De zee was zeer kalm. Dus vlug de sampans The sea was verycalm. Thus the launches tewatergelaten en er op af. Met grote snelheid, were quickly put to water and made off fo r it. maar toch zeer omzichtig, roeiden de With great swiftness, but nevertheless with Boeginezen op het kleine prauwtje af, elk great caution, the Buginese rowed off to the ogenblik een gevecht verwachtende. Men small boat, each moment anticipating a battle. kwam al nader en nader, maar er gebeurde They came closer and closer, but nothing niets. Eindelijk, na zeer zorgvuldig happened. Finally, after maneuvering very manoevreren, kwamen zij langszij van de carefully, they came alongside the boat. But prauw. Maar wie schetst hun verbazing toen zij who could describe their surprise when they in die prauw een beeldschoon meisje zagen saw, lying asleep in this boat, a very beautiful liggen slapen. maiden.140

Ineach version there is more to the storythan this, yet theelements of accidental travel, unconscious encounter and marriage to royalty of another descent group are quite consistent.

I have come to think of such versions of the Sarnapast, those which fo llow what happens to the Sarnawoman, as "the story of the princess bride." One reason I have taken to doing so is for want of a title that might better fit the narrative conventions of insular

Southeast Asia. Many, if not most, "traditional" narratives in insular Southeast Asia are referred to either by a toponym or by the proper name of the main character. In these stories of the Sarnapast, however, the instability of place from one version to another and the fact that they are about relocation makes the use of a toponym fo r a "title" well nigh impossible. Moreover, the main figure inthese versions is generally not referred to by a proper name. 141 While it is not so unusual, in South Sulawesi and in the broader region,

140 Burghoom, p. 3/XI. 4 1 1 True, in LB Lemobajo it states that the daughter of I Papu is named I Lolo. Yet being named "Lolo" is a lot like being named "Princess." "Lolo'' is the Sarnalanguage tenn for descendants of elite Sarna lineage. Tides based on ascribed status are comon throughout theregion : Karaeng in Makassar. Wa Ode and La Ode in Munaand Buton; "I" was similarly used in South Sulawesi. For Sarna speakers "lolo'' is unmistakably aSarnatitle, and it is sometimes also usedthis way inreferring to I Papu in the Bugis­ Ianguage LB Lemobajo manuscript, i.e., as: Lo/o Papu. It is important to state this Sarna language fact

127 142 to encounter narrative variations on any particular story, it is rather unusual for such

stories to have a woman as the fo cus of the narrative. In view ofthe fact that a woman is

at their center and considering the region's conventions fo r naming narratives, it seems

appropriate to use a provisional "title" for this subgroup of stories that applies regardless

of toponymic variation. This is, briefly put, a better alternative to the insufficient but

occasionally encountered phrase: "the Johor princess story. "

To call these versions "the storyof the princess bride" is, admittedly, a bit tongue-

in-cheek. It appears to group the story with Cinderella narratives in which a woman

"marrying up" is a major element of the plot. Insofar as these stories are indeed about the relationship of social class and marriage, this may in fa ct not be so far offbase. However, rather than being about "marrying-up," I argue instead that the concern here is with not being brought down. For one thing, we are always presented with a Sarnawo man whose high-status position is a given; fo r another, her eventual spouse in the narrative is about as high-status as one can get. In other words, no one's ascribed status is narratively in question. So when I say it is about not being brought down, I am not talking about the

unequivocally, fo r in Bugis, "lolo'' means "young" and is used in the Bugis-language equivalent of the Malay "raja muda'' or "crownpri nce." So farI have encountered no real evidence that this Sarna title comes etymologically from Bugis. For those who are tempted (as I have sometimes been) to read into this speculatively in search of some etymological evidence for a political relationship, a helpful cautionary counter example is in order. Sarnais a Philippine language, and in other Philippine languages, Tagalog, fo r instance,lolo means "grandparent," both literallyand as a broader respectfulterm of reference fo r unrelated elders: as in "Lolo Jose," the fam ous "first Filipino," Jose Rizal. Is therea relation between the name I Papu and the word papuwangeng, which Matthes (1874: 149) liststhis way under the Bugis root puwang: "in Mandar a title, about equivalent with gelloreng" itself a term fromthe Bugis root gel/a, cognate with Malay gelar. "title." Similarly one cannot resist the question of whether a relation exists (or not) between the ethnonym "Sarna" and the Bugis equivalent of "slave" (ala): to-samaq. Aswith "lolo'' one finds Philippine language contexts that weigh againstthe temptation to draw pseudo-scholarly folkety mologies between the Bugis and Sarna terms. In Tiworo, incidentally, the "polite" Sarna term for "slave" is seseheq, a doubled form of the wordseheq: "friend." 142 Koolhof(J995) has a gooddiscussion of narrative variation in I La Gal/go; also Petras (1996:33-4. There is arguably no such thing as a "complete" version but only variations; yet all in outline arevery similar. Also see Zainal Abidin (1974), Macknight and Caldwell (2001), and Cummings (200tb). In the Malay world see, inter alia, Proudfoot (19 84), Drakard ( 1986), Matheson ( 1986), de Josselin de Jong ( 1964, 1965, 1975), Braginsky (1990) and Maier (1999).

128 risk of her marrying beneath her station. I amtalking, rather, about the importance of how

the new kin relation comes about, and especially of how it does not transpire. The subtle

but crucial points here are that she is not stolen (as in the attested versions discussed

above) but travels accidentally to arrive in a new land, and that, having arrived there, she

marries a manfrom another royal lineage, yet without negotiations between potential kin

beforehand.

There is a world of difference between the coincidence that led to these

circumstances, and the versions examined earlier where the very intentional theft of a high-born Sarnawoman had grave social implications. The coincidence of accidental travel in "the storyof the princess bride" launches a chain of unintended consequences that not only point the reader/listener in the direction of the unfolding story, but also foreclose certain narrativepossibilities. 143 Her unplanned voyage brings her by mere chance to arrive at the strange shores of Gowa where she is married. It seems straightforward enough. Yet this coincidence is a literary device that enables the portrayal of a rather unusual situation, a situation in which some sort of new kin relation is established, yet is done so as the result of neither theft nor negotiation. Inarri ving

143 Below I go on to discuss accidentally caused events or coincidence as a literary device in "the storyof the princess bride." Using accident or coincidence as a literary device to fo reclose certain narrative possibilities also seems to occur in theworld of Malay narratives. For instance, Ruzy Hashim (2000) finds a similar sort of"accident" in the Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals). There, the accidental closing ofa door causes a key character to commit suicide because he reads this as an action taken by the Sultan, whom he presumes he has angered and thus whose favor he has lost. Hashim argues that this scribal ploy of fo cusing attention on the accidentas a reason for thecharacter's suicide basically obviates the reader/audience's ability to interpret his suicide as an act of protest. Looking nearerat hand, in Sulawesi, we can also find examples of stories in which some versions portray violence as the result of intention, whereas others, in its place, portray accident. For instance, Bougas (1998: 108-9, in Cummings 2001: 429, note 9) offers an example of an accident in "the Story of Maturaga," whereas other versions depict murder. In these other versions, an oral story collected by Matthes (1943 [ 1885]: 384-5) and a manuscript version of the same examined by Cummings (200 1 b: 426-430), the main character intentionally kills the ruler of the underworld by pouring boiling water into his wound. In the version of the story described by Bougas, the ruler of the underworld is killed unintentionally.

129 accidentally andmarrying royalty at Gowa, she is neitherintentionally taken nor

intentionally betrothed. So although she was not promised through marriage negotiation

beforehand, this leaves the audience unable to read her relocation and consequent new

kin connection as the result of coercion.

More than just a literary device that helps the storyto unfold along a certain path

while foreclosing others, this coincidence produces a certain effect, which is to

euphemize what in slightly different circumstances would appear to be her subordination.

By euphemize, here, I do not mean just a clever way of prettifYing that which is socially

unpalatable. Rather, I am suggesting that this device makes accidents happen where there

would otherwise be intention, and thus obscures the blatant expression of social

inequality, in particular that achieved through unnegotiated marriage by coercive means

such as kidnap or theft. What this euphemization does, as Bourdieu might say, is to tum

overt domination into misrecognized or "socially recognized" domination - into, in other

144 words, legitimate authority (Bourdieu 1977: 191-2). this form inequality may then In become contestable on more apparently equal grounds.

144 This idea of euphemization has been an important topic for Bourdieu ( 1991 982] and 1977 [ 1972]). It is not to beconfused with the understanding Scott has of it (1990: 52-SS) which[I reduces a complex sociological phenomenon to a merely verbal one in which the dominant "impose" a benign term on public discourse. For Scott, euphemism is "the self-interested tailioring of descriptions and appearances by dominant powerholders" (1999: 54). However, later in the same work Scott discusses euphemism in a way that comes closer to Bourdieu's sense, at least in so faras it has to do with how the subordinated engage in symbolic violence: " •..Without anonymity the performance of subordinates would revert to compliant deference. The alternative to complete deference, however, is to disguise themessage just enough to skirt retaliation. If anonymity often encourages the delivery of an unvarnished message, the veiling of a message represents the application of varnish"; and further, "Euphemization is an accurate way to describe what happens to a hidden transcript when it is expressed in a power-laden situation by an actor who wishes to avoid the sanctions that directstatement will bring" (1999: 152). What is so striking about all of Scott's formulations in this work is the way they portray what appear to bestraightf orward, more-or� less intentional practices. This is understandablegiven Scott's emphasis on the agency of the subordinated, despite their use of"transcripts." What Bourdieu gets at, tough, is a sociological process(linked to a political-economic context) that is not so consciously engaged in by individuals. Not that he would contest the fa ct that people actively participate in their own domination, only that they most often do not recognize it as such. Bourdieu was concerned with pre-capitalist societies in part as a result of his fieldwork but also to draw contrasts with the modes of domination in capitalist systems:

130 Indeed, inthe version I heard in Tampo, fam iliarto Sarna people in Tiworo and in

the Sembilan islands, this is exactly what happens at the story's climax. Despite the

audience's inability to "read" the narrative's unfolding "events" as a result of coercion, the

implicit potential fo r inequality remains, due to the fa ct that there was no negotiation

beforehand in which each side would have assessed the other's lineage. 145 This implicit

potential fo r inequality is later contested through a Sarna claim to status equivalence,

asserted precisely on the grounds oflegitimacy. Before this can happen, however, the

Sarnawoman must first become recognizable. Who she is must first become known, fo r

the people around her in Gowa do not know who she is, not even her husband.

Becoming known and reminding her descendants

This ignorance of who she is, at least in the versions where she lands in Gowa,

supports the point that these stories are about not being brought down. As with the

accidental travel discussed above, here too, in a similar way, the ignorance of who she is

The reason for the pre-capitalist economy's great need fo r symbolic violence is that the only way in which relations of domination can be set up, maintained, or restored, is through strategies which, being expressly oriented towards the establishment of relations of personal dependence� must be disguised and transfigured lest they destroy themselves by revealing

their true nature; in a word, they must be euphemized. .. It would be a mistake to see a contradiction in the fact that violence is here both more present and more hidden. Because the pre-capitalist economy cannot count on the implacable, bidden violence of objective mechanisms, it resorts simultaneously to fo rms of domination which may strike the modern observer as more brutal, more primitive, more barbarous, or at the same time, as gentler, more humane, more respectful of persons" (emphasis in original) (1977: 191).

145 In considering the sequence of how things are "supposed" to happen, it may be more appropriate to draw comparisons from regional narrative here, rather than from the ethnographic literature. In I La Galigo, for instance, in summarizing the marriage of Sawerigading's parents, Batara Lattuq and We Datu Sengngeng, . Koolhof offers this statement: "Setelah kedua belah pihak meyakinkan diri tentang kesucian darah {p utih) kedua calon pengantin, uang mahar dibawa ke islana dan pernikahan dilaksanakan sangat semarak" (Koolhof 1995: 21). "After the two sides convinced themselves about the purity of the (white) blood of the prospective bride and bridegroom, the brideprice was brought to the palace and a very lively wedding ceremony was carried out."

131 fo recloses certain interpretive possibilities. By making this mysterious woman into kin,

by joining her in some fa shion to Gowa royalty, her hosts, who know neither her status

nor where she is from, and who therefore are completely unable to negotiate a marriage,

cannot be said to demean her (or her kin) intentionally.

In the Sarna language version recorded in Tampo, her identityremains unknown to those in Gowa because she does not speak. It is not just that she is a silent character and the narrator speaks fo r her. Rather, the fact of her not-speaking is very strongly marked. When she arrives, carried in her boat, at the stairs of the palace, she briefly regains consciousness and is asked where she is from, but she gives no answer. Her breath comes haltingly because of hunger and exhaustion, so they feed her and over time nurse her back to health. Once she has fully recovered she still does not answer when the ruler's wife (nda datu) asks where she is from, and so it goes whether she is leftalone or

whether other young women repeatedly ask her. She does not answer, does not, in fact, · speak at all.

146 The Gowa ruler has a dream in which he is told not to neglect this girl, because she is not just anybody. And as he is getting old and his son would not be a suitable heir without a wife, he decides to marryhim to this unspeak.ing young woman. This is agreed to by the elders andthey have a simple wedding, "even though she has no wali" - in

Islamicpracti ce, a male relative legally responsible fo r a bride. After they are married, things between them are harmonious. Yet, even when she becomes pregnant she continues not to speak. She does, nonetheless, appear as a real character in the story who,

146 Whom the teller referred to alternatelyas Somba, the title of the Gowa king, karaeng, the Makassarese title fo r descendants of royal lineage, or datu, a more widely-recognized term in the archipelago fo r rulers of various magnitudes.

132 despite her silence, does things, such as make a sangkinih, a kind of bracelet and belt

amulet made of pieces of fishbone tied together with thread.

Lo Kadir, who had been telling the story,was interrupted at this point in the

narrative by my friend and assisstant, his favorite nephew, who asked: "Wait a second,

this woman who was swept away, where was she from?" Lo Kadir replied, a bit haltingly

at first: "Bajoe." "Bajoe," which in Bugis means "the Bajo," is also the name of a Sarna

settlement on the coast of the Bugis kingdom of Bone. "You don't know her name?" he

asked. To which Lo Kadir replied: "No. Shall I go on?" And his nephew eagerly said,

"yes! •• The exchange confirmed that we in the audience did not knowher name. We also

did not know exactly why she did not speak, but we did know of her Sarnalineage. We

were very aware that in Gowa she now lived with this self-knowledge surrounded by

those who knew nothing about her background.

The connection between her not speaking and their ignorance of where she came

fromsoc ially is very explicitly drawnin an exchange between the Kareng, who is curious

about how things are going with the newlyweds, and his son:

"Baong ai dipakenu na bak.andanu?" "What language do you use with your wife?" 11Karaeng, there is no speaking at all," he said. Yuqna, "Karaen�, misa' sikali baong." Yuqna, "I have only been well-behaved, (yet) she•s had "tapa silisurah14 neku ndaka na nia suara.Tapi no voice. But she also has not opposed" - ngge' du na tantangna, batuahna ansiniang iru meaning by this that she hasn't refused either. ngge' daka du ia kitu. Ai-ai ak.ataku ikut na du "Whatever my desire, she goes along with it na!'• too," he said. "Dadi misa sikalina bicara?" 11SO there hasn't been any speaking at all?" "Misa" yuqna. "Ruruaangne baongku, "None," he replied. 11Alr eady (I have tried) all baong Bugis, baong Mangkasar na, misa" sorts of languages I know: Bugis, Makassar; yuqna. there is nothing, 11 he said. "0, ai jana, .. yuq Datu itu, "suku ai ko jana na 11What, I wonder, 11 the ruler said, "what descent 148 itu?.. group could she be from, this one?"

147 This word was unrecognizableto bothmy self and Lo Kadir's nephew whose first language is Sarna. I think it is an approximation (or unknowncognate) of the Indonesian wordsusila, decent orwell-behaved. 148 Lo Kadir recording; Tampo. 1994, transcription p. 15.

133 When I tried asking people familiar withthis story why they thought she did not speak, I generally got shoulder shrugs, except for one man who pointed out that she did arrive in Gowa so maybe she just did not speak Makassarese. 149

In LB Lemobajo, we learn of the deferral of her identification through a different route, in which no issue is made of whether or not she speaks. We learn of it in a scene at the court, after her kinsmen have fo und her. This scene fo llows their collective departure fo r and arrival at Gowa, after they unexpectedly received word of her whereabouts. I

Papu addresses his "children and grandchildren":

Pada (mengkali)nga i upowadae · "Listen, everyone, to what I say: Upomanasa i baja ri denniarie na to pa(da) I hope that tomorrow at early dawn we all tarakka sempeq departto gether by sail. Narekko pada marengkalinga no obbi If you all hear the call, nassituru no pada redduq i toddoqmu agree, all of you, to pull out your punting poles, muabang ngi gaj omu push your oars, mupatettonngi pallajarammu mupada rui i stand up your boat masts, and hoist your sails, sempeqmu, tapada sempeq muttama ri Gowa together we will sail into Gowa, together we

149 This is a good example of why"native exegisis" cannot be taken fo r granted. Although it certainly is possible fo r "natives" to reflect theoretically on their experience of the social world as well as on narratives that have signifiance fo r them, the way in which these reflections are expressed tothe anthropologist do, fo r very clear reasons, make "native exegesis" something that the analystshould be very cautious about taking at face value. Although here I am not dealing with practice but with literary or narrative representation, the fo llowing observations by Bourdieu are still relevant. He points out that even the best-informed "informant," when invited by the anthropologist's questioning to effect a reflexive and quasi-theoretical return on his own practice, produces a discourse which compoundstwo opposing systems of lacunae. Insofaras it is a discourse of fa miliarity, it leaves unsaid all that goes without saying: the informant's remarks - like the narratives or commentaries of those whom Hegel calls 'original historians' (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon or Caesar) who, 'living in the spirit of the event,' take fo r granted thepresuppos itions takenfo r granted by the historical agents - are inevitably subject to the censorship inherent in their habitus, a system of schemes of perception and thought which cannot give what it does give to bethought and perceived without ipso fa cto producing an unthinkable and unnameable. Insofar as it is an outsider-oriented discourse, it tends to exclude all direct referenceto cases (that is, virtually all information directly attached to proper names evoking andsummarizing a whole system of previous information). Because thenative is that much less inclined toslip into the language of familiarity to the extent that the questioner strikes him as unfamiliar with the universe of reference implied by his discourse (a fa ct apparent in the fo rm of the questions asked, particular or general, ignorant or informed), it is understandable that anthropologists should so often fo rget the distance between learned reconstruction of the native world and the native experience of that world, an experience which finds expression only in the silences, ellipses, and lacunae of the language of familiarity (emphasis in original) (Bourdieu 1917: 18).

134 tapada manessai wi karebae engakana ri Gowa will investigate the truth of the news that at the ri sari bolana palace of Gowa in the house of the Somba, is Sombae anaq puwammu Loloe. your Puwang's child, the Lolo." Aga napada pallebbani sempeqna ia maneng So all together those many descendants maegae sininna anaq eppoe. unfurled their sails. Napada mammanuq-manuqna lao sompeqna Together in procession, day and night, they 150 muttama ri Gowa esso wenni. sailed a course to enter Gowa.

Once they arrive in Gowathere is a protracted negotiation between I Papu and the

ruler's envoy, which results in an invitation fo r I Papu to come up to the court on a

propitious day. In the same scene in which her identityis later revealed to the court

audience, we, the reader/audience, learn that the people in Gowa did not, up to this point,

know who she is. Rather than dwell on the question of who she is through direct inquiry,

the manuscript narrative indicates their ignorance of her provenance through terms and

phrases that refer to her. These references to her simultaneously signal her intimate

relationship to the Somba. �he herself is not actually present as the guests begin to fe ast

and to enjoy the welcome laid out fo r I Papu. After they finisheating, I Papu describes

his situation, how his daughter I Lolo was lost at sea, and that all his descendants have

been out looking fo r her. Hearing this story:

Nakkedena nawa-nawa na Sombae, The Somba said in his heart, "Baraq ia naengka I Papu sibawa anaq "Perhaps the coming of I Papu with his eppona maegae many descendants - Baraq ia na puwanna enrennge maybe he is her father {puwang} or the ncaj ianngenngi one who gave birth to ia engka we uwewa sipangulungeng the one I caused to be joined-together-in-life, ia upobaine who I made a wife tekkuissennge apolenna whose origins I do not know naengkari salassae." so she is at the palace."

· Naamennyeqna paimeng tudannge That meeting came back clearly napada massappa nawa-nawa tona adeq e while searching his heart also fo r the adat ri engkana i I Lolo I Papu sibawa fo r the coming of I Lolo I Papu with

150LB Lemobajo, p. 4. "His children and grandchildren" may refer to his descendantsand/or to "his

people,"blurring the line between the figurative and literal. Compare Makassarese usage. In Makassarese,

fo r a karaeng in relation to those lower, or taunna - "his people," ana '-ana' na would similarly literally signifY "his children," and is "therefore 'as if his children"' Chabot(19 96 [1950]:149).

135 anaq eppona maegae his many descendants baraq ia na pangulungenna perhaps it is she, whose life is joined with Karaenta Torisombae our Karaeng the Sombae, tettaissennge apolenna we do not know her origins, baraq ia na puwanna. perhaps he is her father {puwang} .

Nakkedana Karaenta Sombae ri Our Karaeng the Somba said to his Adeq Adeq Pabbicarana Pabbicara {a courtofficial }, "Baraq madeceng riassiturussi "Perhaps it would be good if my pangulungekku one-joined-in-life, baineku tenrisennge apolenna my wife, whose origins are not known, naripassu engka tudang kasiwiyang was brought out to come to sit and serve 151 ri olona arajannge. before the regalia."

The Adeq Pabbicara gives a very non-committal response to this suggestion, so the Somba decides to go ahead with his idea. I should note that earlier, when I Papu had

first negotiated to have an audience with him, the So mba had been informed by his envoy

of I Papu's full "title,'' or that he was also called, "Tidung Karaeng BayokaNi somba

To nji." The meaning of this phrase was not explained at that point - it is neither Bugis nor Sarna - but its significance becomes clear inthe scene below.

"Assuro no powadanngi ti laleng pattaranaqna "Tell (someone) in the interior to let her napanguju i pangulungekku guardian know to prepare my one-joined-in-life tenrissennge apolenna whose origins are not known napassuq I mai ri saliweng tudang kasiwiyang to come out here to the outside to sit and do ri arajannge ri olona Karaenta." homage to the regalia before our Karaeng." Naripanguju na ri laleng. So preparations weremade in the interior. Aga natepu panguji ni, When the preparations were complete, naripatarakkana joppa massu ri saliweng. she was sent offwalkin g, heading fo r the Nariremba-remba massu ri pattaranaq exterior, accompanied by her close marilalenna. courtiers. Natanrapi na natudang ri olona arajanna She arrived and sat before the regaliaof our Karaenta Torisombae. Karaeng the Torisomba. Nasiammennyekeng si tudannge It was again clear to all the assembled, siannawa-nawang pada mita I anaqna I Papu mutually they thought together observingthe maenyeq-6nyeq e wekkeq tanrena child of I Papu whose development of stature kuwae tosa akessingenna was exemplacy, her beauty the same as the ritarenreqna uleng seppuloe lima ompona, rising moon on the fifteenth, the friend who naewae sisampureng Karaenta Torisombae shared a sarung with our Karaeng Torisombae

151 LB Lemobajo, pp. 8-9. Karaeng is a Makassarese title; Adeq Pabbicara is a court official, an advisor. "Gave birthto" is a translation of"na poanaq i," a phrase that is moreakin to using "ch ild" as a verb, i.e., he child-ed her, ratherthan "fatherd" her.

136 ri laleng balekona ceppanigae. inside the protected circle of a mosquito net. Nakkeda nawa-nawa na Karenta Torisombae In his heart our Karaeng the Torisomba said, enrennge adeq Tomarilalennge and the Adeq To Marilaleng nenninya to ri laleng gowa/rie, as well as the people inhabiting the room, pada makkada nawa-nawanna makkedae, together in their hearts they said, "I Papu puwanna pangulungenna "I Papu is the father {puwang} of the one­ Karaenta Torisombae. joined-in-life of the Karaeng ta To Risomba. I I Papu puwanna I Lola. I Papu na poanaq i. Papu is the fa ther of I Lola, she is his child.11 · Nagiling na mala ota-otang pangulungenna She turned, the one-joined-in-life of our Karaenta, Karaeng, to take the betel service naitai asakkekenna napoliseqe ota-otannge. and check that it's contents were complete. Nakkedana ri Karaenta Torisombae, Then she said to our Karaeng the Torisomba, "0, Karaenta Torisombaya, "Oh our KaraengTo Risombaya, eroq kaq lampa ngadallekang ngi Karaengku I wish to come close to my Karaeng sare I pappangajaiyang. to give the serving. Ia minjo sitoj eng-tojeng Karaengku You know, actually, my Karaeng, nikanaya I Papu, nikanatonngi the one named I Papu is also called Tidung Karaeng Bayoka Nisombatonji. '' . Tidung Karaeng Bayoka Nisomba Tonji." Aga nakkedana Karaenta Sombae ri bainena, So the Samba said to his wife, "Mange mako. u "Go." Natakkau na nawa-nawanna The Karaeng ta To Risomba's heart, and that of Karaenta Torisombae the Adeq To Mabbicara and the room's enrennge adeq Tomabbicarana inhabitants were stupefied. ninniya to rilaleng goearie. All of them, the inhabitants of the palace, said Pada makkeda nawa-nawanna liseqna salassae, in their hearts, "Arung maraja ha paleq ri lau napobaine "Great royalty apparently of the sea/east was Karaenta Torisombae, taken as a wife by our Karaeng the Torisomba, nisoko itta-ittana engka ri salassae for all this time at the palace naewa sipuppureng Karaenta sharing the fate of our Karaeng re laleng balekona ceppanigae, in the circle of the mosquito net's shadow; na deq na engka rapi nawa-nawa i ri there was nothing within their hearts about the akkarungeng marajana pangulungenna great royalty of the one-joined-in-life of our Karaenta. Karaeng. Naengka mani puwanna napada engka Only later after her father came did we then paddissengetta ri onrong akkarungenna know the place of her kingdom, the friend 152 naenae sisampureng Karaenta. sharing our Karaeng's saru11g.

Thus do the people of Gowa learnof her lineage in LB Lemobajo. In the story recorded fromthe Sarnaman, Lo Kader, in Tampo, the revelation of who she is accompanies her first public act of speech, or rather, of song. In that version, she

152 LB Lemobajo, pp. 9-10. When she speaks,add she resses him "our" karaeng and "my" karaeng; but more interesting still is the way that in her speech, what washertof ore the Bugis definite article affix-e is replacedby that of Makassarese-y o. A little "local dialogue flavor"? A sarung is a long piece of cloth oftensown end toend in theshape of a large tube,and has been used throughout much of the archipelago as a primary article of clothing. Sharing one, as with a mosquito net, isequivalent tosharing a bed.

137 continues not to speak all the way through childbirth. In contrast with her silence, the baby, once it starts to cry, cannot seem to stop. Attendants try all kinds of things: they try to put it to bed, they sing to it, they try Bugis songs and Makassarese songs, but nothing seems to help. In the meantime, its silent mother takes a machete and goes out to find pieces of bamboo, which she then splits and bends and, bringing them back up to the house, weaves into a cradle or a swing. She hangs it securely and climbs in:

A, turus tapaqna rnatodah iru ningkolo, turus As soon as she sat in the swing she did this pugaina batitu tanangna, seakan malaku ia with her hands as if she wererequesting the ana ore. Dijulukang ka ia. Dijulukang ka ia child. He was given to her. He was given to her ampina ne anana itu. Tatarintahna ana na. and she rocked this child in her arms. She Soro tatarintahna, turus batuahna iru pallihna gazed at her child. As soon as she looked at her uyana. child, she immediately sang to him. The song Uyana yuqna: went like this: "Manna bajo tobajoa" qna "Manna bajo tobajoa" he said "Manna cidung tociduang. "Manna cidung tociduang. Cidung karaeng Cidung karaeng bajo ka ni somba tongji." bajo ka ni somba tongji." Turus takatonang batuahna karaeng Sarna bele. Right away it was known that this meant she's A, turus takatonnang mandore. Bo-suku Sarna a karaeng Sarna! It was immediately bele. Bajo batuahna, adi, Somba bele na itu. understood over there. W o-from Sarna A, ditetene, di anu, patilauang (ansiniang iru). people! Bajo, in other words, you know? Ah, she was examined, was whatsit--questioned about (her provenance). 153

Duringfieldwork I encountered fairly widespread remembrance of this particular

154 part of the story. People who did not recall other narrative details offered me this

tsJ LoKadir recording, Tampo, 1994, transcription p. 16. Ansiniang is a tough wordto translate. "Asa/­ usuf' was one Indonesian suggestion for it. In english this is often taken to mean "origin," however, both terms can indicatedescent or pedigree, even history. In this case I have chosen "provenance" in the sense of earliest known history, rather than origin, fo r ansiniang is a nominalizedfo rm of the root ansini which one would translate inIndonesian as tadi, and in English, with some difficulty, as a word that indicates priority in relation to a specified (or implied) time. Ansini, for instance, signifies "before" (now), "last" (night), and similar formulations. Tadi does not have an equivalent fo rm in Indoneisan,the closest thing being tadinya. Ansiniang hasa broader semantic range. Indicating priority in relation to a specifiedor implied time; here the temporal priority is genealogical: her "antecedents" rather than her "ascendants." 1s4 An older Sarna man on Pulau Kambuno in theSembilan Islands recalled thatthere was more than just thisone couplet in verse. Infact, in what he recalled, thisparticular couplet came out in response to a perceived insultand not simply in an effort to stop her baby's cryingand thus ending her own silence. The importantpoint hereis that thisphrase in the couplet and what it signified maintained a prominent place in

138 poetic couplet, or at least an approximation of it, as with Lo Kadir's rendition above. The 55 couplet is in Makassarese, in a poetic fo rm called a kelong. 1 For those who recalled the

kelong, it did not matter that they could not speak Makassarese as they offered their best

approximation of it. It did not matter that they could not translate the couplet literally,

since the narrative context made its meaning perfectly clear to them. This was the

understanding they presented to me: that even though her child was the son of Gowa

royalty, her descent was also royal, and being royal also received homage. The narrative

context not only provided a setting in which this claim was asserted, but also illustrated

that it was recognized among the most respected of status equals, in legendary Gowa. As

the story is generally known only to high-status Sarna people, its message was 56 unmistakably an affirmation the of legitimacy of their own elite lineage. 1

Although this kelong seems to resound through the generations, no informant was

able to offer an explanation of what or where "Tidung" was. One man suggested a village

of this name near Makassar; but it is an inland, not a coastal, village. This seems to be the

place that Vosmaer, who readily admitted that Bajo "origins" are a matter of guess-work,

thought they may have lived in an earlier time. Vosmaer did not quote a kelong, but he

did say: "It is only by way of tradition that they themselves contend to have been

a somewhat different version of the story. In fact, it was much less common fo r me to hear "tellings" than it was to encounter references to the narrative, either through "quotations" of this kelong or references to it. 155 Bugis has similar sortsof poems called elong. 156 Interestingly, the affirmation of Sarna elite lineage in these stories takes place utterlywithout any reference to the "Karaeng Bayo" who is said, in the Gowa Chronicles, to be a co-founder of the royal lineage of Gowa. This is especially interesting in light of Cummings' work showing that oral traditions from marginal Makassaeserealms outside Gowa contested Gowa's dominance by claiming to show precisely what the Gowa Chroniclesaid was unknown, namely, the origins ofkaraeng Bayo. Some narratives laid claim to this Bajo Prince as one of their own, or even to prior possession ofGowa's most sacred regalia (Cummings 2003: 542-3). In the Sarna stories I anlayze there is no attempt to link their past with these mythical origins of Gowa's elite lineage. This continues to surprise me, given that Gowa elites to this day say that one is not the real thing - i.e., Gowa royalty - if one has not got a little bit of Bajo in one's lineage. It seems fair to say that Sarna stories of the past are simply not concerned with ties to the very "origins" ofGowa royalty.

139 established there in the past, for which reason they also call themselves Badjo people of

Tidoeng" (Vosmaer 1839: 125).157

Matthes similarly states that Tidoeng is a place near Gowa where the Toe-ri- dje 'ne's or Bayo's had once been established. Yet he also mentions that there likewise existed a region called Tidoeng on the eastcoast of Borneo, andhe cites a reference to the people there as shipbuilders.158 Perhaps, he offers, the name of the region of Tidoeng on

Borneois due to a settlement of Tidoengers or Toe-ri-dje'ne's - in other words, a settlement of people from nearGowa. It could also be, he adds finally,that Tidoeng in

Gowa is a colony of the Tidoeng group on Borneo (Matthes 1859: 40).

Who the Tidung were and what happened to them deserves a fullerexploration than space here allows, but some furtherremarks should be made. The evidence overwhelmingly points to northeast Borneoand the western Sulu archipelagoas places where Tidung people had been based, but their relation to Sarnaor Bajo people remains fa r from clear. The word "tidong" survives as a term for "piraten in several central and northern Philippine languages and also as an ethnonym for agriculturalists speaking languages of the ldaangroup in northeast Borneo (Prentice 1970; Sather 1972, both in

Frake 1980: 323). In thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries, "tidong" was one of two terms (the other being Camucones) used to label especially fierce non-Muslim pirates of

157 Pelras(19 72: 163-4) mentions that Vosmaer placed "Tidung" near Goa, although he did not specifY where in Vosmaer's workthis appears. The relevant passage reads: Er bestaat intusschen veel waarschijnlijkheid. dat diegenen. welke tot den stam der Orang Badjos kunnen gerekend worden tebehooren, zich vroeger vooral in bet Makassarsche rijk moeten hebben opgehouden. Ten aanzien dezergissing wordt zekere, vrij aanzienlijke, digt bij Goa gelegene negerij Tidoeng genoemd, hoezeerer geene sporen meerte vinden zijn, dat dit oord hun eenmaal tot verblijf verstrekte. Het isalleenli jk bij wijze van overlevering. dat zij zelven beweren, vroegerdaar gevestigd tezijn geweest, om welke reden zij zich ook wei OrangBad jos van Tidoeng noemen (Vosmaer 1839: 125). us He gives the citation as: Bijdrag. tot de taal- land- en volkenkunde van Neerlandsch Indi�, Tijdschrift van bet Koninklijklnstituut. Dee! IV, No.3, p. 250 and 255 (Matthes 1859: 40).

140 the Sulu archipelago.They carriedout raids throughoutthe Philippines from bases in

western Sulu and northeastern Borneo (Ba.mmtes 1878: 294-5, and de Ia Costa 1961: 545,

in Frake 1980: 323) and also cruised from northeast Borneo west down the coast as far as

Labuan (Forrest 1780: 374). Frequently at odds with Sulu Muslims, who, for instance,

would not permitthem into the ports of Cagayan (Forrest 1780: 16), they were defeated

in the late seventeenth century by Spanish and Sulu attacks on their home bases

(Barrantes 1878: 294-5, and de Ia Costa 1961: 545, in Frake 1980: 323; Forrest 1780:

335).

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Dutch were able to describe the "Tidoengsche

Ianden" or Tidung lands - from 1848 - as the northernmost part of the Dutch region of the eastcoast ofBomeo (Hageman 1855: 73). "Thiscoastal land is traversed by remarkable water-communications through the connecting and branching" of a number of

159 rivers which, "in the charts ...appear as a coastal island group." Von Dewall, who, as administrator, first turnedhis attention to the local Tidoeng chiefs in 1848 -bestowing on each a Dutch flag (Haegman 1855: 76) - reckoned that the Tidoengs, when they converted to Islam, had split offfrom the local Beroessoes. He described the Tidoeng as a people who "do not go to sea," withtwo notable exceptions. One "cantankerous" group estimated to have 500 weapon bearing men had lived on Tarakkan islandbef ore 1848 and had good relations with the Sulu pirates who had used the islandas a baiting place. After

1848, for a time at least, these stayed away from Tarak.kan, leavingthe "Tarakkaners" to

"furnish finematwork and build sea vessels" (von Dewall l855: 442). The Bengauwans, another group ofTidoengs, almost as strong as those from Tarakkan, had earlier lived at

159 "Charts" rather than "maps" since we are talking about coastal areas. "Dil kustland wordt doorsneden van eene mer/cwaardige watergemeenschap, door de verbinding en verta/eking der voorname rivieren... Op de lcaarten komi deze verta/eking voora/s eene kust-eilanden groep" (Hageman 1855 [ 1852]: 73).

141 --�� �------

the mouth of theSedoeloen and made their existence from plunderon nearby rivers. They

made things so difficult even for the local Boeloengan traders that finally the Sultan of

Boeloengan decided "to destroy (vernielen) the whole clan" and the Boeloengan and

Tidoeng princes united to lay waste to the village on the Sedoeloen, killing the greater

part of the Bengauwans and condemning the rest to slavery (von Dewall 1855: 443).

But does this completely explain what became of the seafaring Tidung? Hageman

indicated that earlier European travellers variously called them "Tidong,11 "Tedong,"

"Teroen" and "Tiroen," and he specifically states that "the native name is Tidoeng." In

such a coastal landwhere the rivers resolve, from a bird's eye view, into a littoral island

group, it should hardly surprise us that he fo llows thisremark with a most interesting

footnote explaining that the native name Tidoeng is used, "not so much for the land, as

160 for the people, who live on the coast." Yet neither Hageman nor von Dewall draw any

connectionbetween Tidoeng and Badjo people. As for the latter, von Dewall tells us that

in this region they lived in Berou, but that no Badjo's lived in Boeloengan (von Dewall

1855: 447), which lay between Berouto the south and "the Tidoeng lands" to thenorth. It

seems possible, but unlikely, that the people of these coastal islands, the Tidoengs, were

so thoroughly distinct from the Badjo's both further down the coast in Berou and further

up the coast, as well as in the nearby Sulu archipelago to the northeast. Did they speak a

Samalan languagelike most other inhabitants of this archipelago (except the Tausug)?

And was "Tidoeng"just another exonym, like "Badjo," for people who called themselves

"Sarna"?The evidence is certainlysuggestive, but the matter will probably remain

unresolvable.

160 "Niet zoo zeer voor het land, als voor het volk. dot de kust bewoont" (Hageman 1855 [ 1852]: 73. note I).

142 More than a metaphor

Matthes, in his dictionary, refers to a Makassarese "children's song" in making the point that the Toe-ri-je'ne' or Bayo people (as they are known in Makassarese) were also named Tidoeng (1859: 40). This "children's song," collected in his compilation of

Makassarese literature, contains within it a version of the bUong introduced above.

O

Matthes inserts a long note in his translation at this point. It first elucidates that

Tunisombaya is Arung Palak.k:a, "who, in the time of Speelman [i.e. during the Makassar

War in the 1 ih century] rendered such important services to the government." He then tries to help the reader by explaining that,

To understand this kelongwell, one has to know that according to the tradition (overlevering) the son of one of the kings, either Bone or Gowa, wasmarried to the daughter ofLolo-poleyang, or the king of the Tu-ri-je'ne's, and that, because of that, really, the government would have come into the hands of 1 strangers. 63

161 Matthes (1883 [1860]: 223, 43 1 ). 162 "Wie zijn die mensen met hunne witte armbanden? Dat zijn de kinderen der Badjo's, de afs tammelingen der Toe-ri-dje'nti's. Maar al zijt ook gij nog Badjo's, toch behoort hijnlet meer u zelven toe. AI zijt ook gij nog Tidoengers (verge/. Woodenb. op tidoeng); loch behoortgij niet meer u zelven toe; want de koning der Tidoengers is een afs tammeling van Toe-ni-sombaya" (Matthes 1883 {1860]: 225). 163 Matthes (1883 [ 1860]: 225). Amusingly - for my own readers may fee l a bit confused aboutjust which kingdom it was thatthe Bajo were then supposedly "under" - Matthes himselfhad trouble figuring out whether it was Gowa orBone or how it could have beenboth. "Who this Gowa or Bone prince had been

143 To put things in more fa miliarterm s, the daughter of a Bajo king married a prince of Gowa or Bone. Because of that, according to Matthes, "the government" - in other words, whatever structure of rule had existed fo r the Bayo's or Tidoengers or To e-ri- dje 'ne's - thereby came into the hands of another group's royalty. This perspective, just to make things absolutely plain, is perfectly patrilineal. It clearly positions the people associated with this "Lolo-poleyang" and his daughter as coming under, or being subordinated to, the authority of either a Gowa or Bone prince.

Needless to say, this is not exactly the perspective that Sarna people in the field brought to their interpretations of the kelong, or at least, to the version fam iliar to them.

For them, the important thing, on the contrary, was that the princess was recogqized as high-status among the elites of another group. And as the kelong reminded her son, and through this also reminded the Sarna audience of the story, both he and they high-status ' .

Sarna lineage. It affirmed this, despite the implicit possibility of tracingtheir lineages through other descent groups, even other royal ones.

Who or what the tidung were, as mentioned above, was not really important to contemporary Sarnapeople familiarwith the couplet. They neither knew what, precisely, the term meant, nor did this seem to concernthem . For what mattered most was the kelongs message, its import or significance, which to them was made clear from its context. The sense of the kelong thus remained clear to Sarnapeople, both fr om its

the people could not tell me. Even less could theyshow me any kind of writtendocuments in which that event would appear." Matthes here implies that he asked after manuscripts about the Sarna past, adding his most venerable nameto the list of scholars looking fo r such lontaraq. He adds, furthermore: "This much, however, is clear, that this waterpeople (watervolk) more and more is starting to lose its independence and the character of its nature; so that it is becoming harder with every day to determine something regarding its origin and history." Matthes thus adds his voice to the chorus of people decrying the loss of a Sarna character which they imagine to exist apart from entanglements with others. A presumed independence is tied to an imagined isolation, and their past to an implicit unity in which thecolle ctivity had an "origin."

144 narrative context, as well as from the social context of its reproduction. However, over

time, "tidung" itself became untranslatable; it lost its specificdenotative relevance to the

Sarnainterpretive contexts in which it appeared.

A similardynam ic is at work in Burghoom's version of the story of the princess

bride, which remains useful here for contrastivepurposes. In Burghoom's re-presentation,

certain aspects of the storyremained unsignified for him and for the Dutch audience that

he envisioned. Here, for instance, (with some overlap to refreshyour memory) is how the

scene of unconscious encounter continues in his version:

Eindelijk, na zeer zorgvuldig manoevreren, Finally, after maneuvering very carefully, they kwamen zij lanszij van de prauw. Maar wie came alongside the boat. But who could schets hun verbazing toen zij in die prauw een describe their surprise when they saw, lying beeldschoon meisje zagen liggen slapen. Uit asleep in this boat, a very beautiful maiden. haar gehele wezen, hoe haveloos zijer op dat From her whole being, however ragged she moment ook uit zag, uit haar gehele wezen appeared at that moment, her nobility, her high straalde haar hogeafkomst, haar adeldom. birth, radiated from her entire being. Maybe Misschien was het wei een dewi, een fe e. she was even a goddess, a fa iry. Snel en voorzichtig bracht men bet prauwtje Quickly and carefully they brought the little langszij van het admiraalschip zonder haar boat alongside the admiralship without waking wakker te maken, zonder haar to storen. her, without disturbing her. For that they had Daartoe had men de moed niet. En de jonge not the courage. And the young Crown Prince kroonprins keek vol bewondering op de schone looked down upon the sleeping beautyfu ll of slaapster neer. Dit moest een princes zijn, dat admiration. This must be a princess, that much was zo te zien. was clear to see. Toen Putri Papu uit de slaap ontwaakte was zij When Putri Papu woke from sleep she was reeds aan boord van het admiraalschip en stond already aboard the admiralship and the Crown de Kroonprins van Bone naast haar. En daar de Prince of Bone stood beside her. And as the Boeginezen zich bij hunvaart op Malakka ook Buginese, from their voyaging to Malacca, had de Maleise spraak hadden meester gemaakt kon also mastered the Malay language, the Crown de Kroonprins met haar spreken en vol verwon­ Prince could speak with her, and fullof wonder dering hoorde hij naar haar avontuurlijkever­ he listened to her adventurous story, the story 164 haal, het verbal van "de reisvan Putri Papu." ofthe "the voyage of Putri Papu."

In Burghoom's version, this passage is actually followed by a section about that voyage, complete with her decision to weigh the anchor of the fine new boat, the dead calm before the storm, and the question: Would she still get offwith her life? Yet

164 Burghoom, p. 3/XI.

145 currents and winds eventually abate, the boat turns out to bewell provisioned (as

Burghoorn seemed to think all Bajo boats are), and with some citrus and even a Bajo­

style tinder box, her courage and lust fo r life return. 165 She is, as it happens, perfectly able

to stay alive away from land, at least fo r the time being. It was, however, important fo r

her, Burghoorn tells us, that she had reached the current below the Borneo coast:

Was zij in de stroom onder de Java-wal Had she wound up in the current below the terechtgekomen dan was zij vermoedelijkdoor Java coast, then she would probably have gone de Floris-zee en de Banda-zee op de Tanimbar­ offthrough the Flores and Banda Seas to the eilanden of de Nieuw Guinea-kust afgegaan. Tanimbar Islands or the New Guinea coast. Wat er dan met haar gebeurd was laat zich ge­ What then would have happened to her is makkelijk raden. Maar zeker was de geschied­ easily guessed. But fo r certain the history of enis van Poetri Papoe dan nooit geschreven Poetri Papoe would never have been written geworden. Op de Tanimbar-eilanden en op then. In the Tanimbar Islands and in New Nieuw Guinea heerste een slavernij en kanipal­ Guinea reigned a slavery and cannibalism of isme van de ergste vorm. Beter zou zij dan the worst form. It would be better, then, fo r her tussen de eilanden door de lndische Oceaan to float between the islands into the Indian ingedreven zijn en daar omgekomen in de Ocean and there perish in the waves. This golven. Dit zou nog een betrekkelijk zachte would have been a relatively mild death in dood geweest zij n in vergelijkingmet de ver­ comparison with the expectations on the wachtingen op genoemde kusten. Maar aforementioned coasts. But luckily the easterly gelukkig kreeg de oostelijke stroom haar te current took hold of her and offshe went with pakken en met stroom en wind ging het op wind and current to Celebes.166 Celebes aan.

This narration of her voyage ends with her waking on board the admiralship, where we

learn that:

Met grote interesse had de Kroonprins bet The Crown Prince had listened to Poetri verhaal van Poetri Papoe aangehoord. En als Papoe's story with great interest. And as a Sultansdochter en Kroonprinses werd zij door Sultan's daughter and a Crown Princess she de Sultanszoon met aile eerbied en onder­ was treated by the Sultan's son with every scheiding, haar hoge ning waardig, behandeld. respect and distinction dignifYingher high De jonge vorst was niet aileen geroerd door rank. The young prince was not only moved by haar jeugd en uitzonderlijke schoonheid maar her youth and exceptional beauty but as much evenzeer door haar moed en "zeemanschap". ­ by her courage and "seamanship." -And this En vooral dit laatste was voor hem, een zoon last especially was fo r him, a son of the sea, der zee, wei iets heel bijzonders. really something quite special. And Poetri En Poetri Papoe, kon zij ongevoelig blijven Papoe, could she remain unfeeling to her

165 Burghoom, p. I /XII - 3/XII. 166Burghoom, p. 3/XIl - 4/XII.Burghoom nowhere mentions knowledge ofwritten accounts of this story other than his own, so presumably when he says "would never have been written," he means by himself.

146 voor haar jonge, mooie redder ?? Een young, handsome rescuer? A Sultan's son and a Sultanszoon en een goed zeeman ?? Hij kende good seaman? He knew her folk and her haar taal en haar volk, dat had hij opzi jn reizen language, which he had learned on his voyages. geleerd. En de zoon der zee had de dochter der And the son of the sea had fo und the daughter 167 zee gevonden. ofthe sea.

Here, ratherthan an imposition or projection of European categories onto Malay

and Indonesian literary genres {Sears 1996: especially 75� 120; Sweeney 1991a), we seem to have instead a "reading,'' or more properly, a hearing, of a Sarna narrative filtered

through European genre expectations. In contrast with the other oral and written versions of the story, in Burghoorn's version, she does not land on a strange coast but rather is rescued by the Crown Prince. Who she is does not remain a mysteryuntil her lineage is revealed, but instead, there is no hiding the fact that she is a princess because nobility radiates fromher entire being even while she sleeps - and in an extremely disheveled

168 state. Nor does she remain silent but rather relates her story directly to the Crown

Prince as soon as she wakes. Burghoorn suggests that perhaps she is, after all, a goddess or a fairy. And in the end, the son of the sea finds the daughter of the sea. Clearly not about not-being-brought�down, the story has become, through Burghoorn's ears and in his hands, a sort of girl meets boy fairytale.

167 Burghoorn, p. 4/XII - 5/XII. 8 16 This point is made in contrast with the other versions of the storyexam ined above. In other words, her radiating nobilityis a stark contrast to the way her identity in the Bugis-language LB Lemobajo and in the Sarna oral version from Tampo present her provenance as unknown until revealed. As I discuss below (p. 144), Burghoorn, in other words, did not get the euphemized message of not-being-brought-down or the allegory it represents. Curiously, although no light is specified here, a quality of radiating light or an aura is a fe ature common to Javanese wahyu tales (Sears 1996: 49, 205; Florida 1995: 39 not 75, 205 note 238, 287-8, 287 note S). It is quite possible thatBurghoorn had a colonial education that fa miliarized him with this notion (also found in Malay contexts). He might, therefore, with this one particular detail, be projecting his European expectations of "native" genres onto a Sarnatale of the past. However, the broader point about his re-presenting the tale filtered through European genre expectationsremains, as evidenced by the style of the narrative passages, by his discursions into fa ntasy (see above, p. l 0 I note 121) and by phrases such as "de schone s/aapster" - "sleeping beauty" - that resonate unmistakably with fa irytales in Dutch.

147 As with the other versions, Burghoom's uses her unplanned voyage as a way to

explain how Bajo people, searching for her, became dispersed throughout the

archipelago. It is, therefore, also a story of her relocation and theirs collectively. Like

some other versions, his also portrays them as unable to return without her. Yet, there is

anadded dimension to Burghoom's "explanation" of their dispersalwhich I have never

encountered in any other version. When her father (in this case the Johor Sultan) in his

''judgement" (vonnis) against their negligence decrees that the people should go in search

of her, he also decrees that, "They may have no fixed dwelling place, lay out no gardens

and cultivate no land; at the most they may raise temporary huts at the margin of the highwaterline. They must reside in their boats and live from what the sea yields to them."169 In other words, at least until Putri Papu is fo und, he condemns them to a maritimenomadic lifestyle,something that, fo r Burghoom as for most other EtJropean

observers, both encapsulated what it meant to be "Badjau'' andcalled fo r an explanation.

His version presents quite a contrast with the other versions of the story of the princess bride, which implicitly clarifythroughout the narrative how she manages to come offwith a marriage to Gowa royalty which, although unarranged, does not leave her status-diminished. Seen in the context of South Sulawesi cultural production, it is unusual for the story to fo cus on a woman. However, given that it does, it is not so surprising that the storyshould concentrate on the importance of women's status in relation to the conduct of marriage. Millar (1989) shows how in contemporary Bugis society, weddings - the ultimate status symbol - allow for an adjustment of ascriptive status to personal achievement. Theachievements that characterize people of high status varywith changing political and economiccondi tions. Hence, what constitutes

169 Burghoom, p. 1/IV.

148 "achievement" for someone high status varies, and ascriptive status gets re-evaluated with respect to this in the course of a life (not to mention after death), and, especially, in the course of weddings. This is not only an acknowledgement of personal achievement but is also the fo rmal means to recognize in practice what, theoretically (or, ideologically), must have made such achievements possible, in other words, one's "true status," which is nevertheless established by one's descent history (Millar 1989 chapters 1 and 2). In

Chabot's study of kinship, status and gender in Makassar, weddings are similarly a measure of social standing (Chabot 1996 [1950] : 135). While a person's standing is determined by descent and personal qualities, men, it is believed, should strive to rise, while "women should merely take care that they do not fa ll" (1996 [1950]: 143). Men of the karaenggroup regularly marry women of the common people and the relatives of the woman favor such marriages as they raise their own social status (1996 [1950]: 145). At a wedding between people regarded as equal in standing, "the woman is, as it were, the gauge of value of her group," and were her bride price - the most important expression of her standing - to go down, it would lower the standing of her kin group (1996 [1950]:

141 ). How much more so, then, if no negotiation of the brideprice were to take place. It is important to remember, as the approach in both these works stress, that one's ascriptive status is something that is assigned according to ideologies of descent, but that in practice, re-evaluation of that status takes place. Weddings andthe practices surrounding them are aparticularly loaded site for such evaluations. For people to be regarded as having equal standing in a wedding requires negotiation beforehand. Rather than see status simply as a pre-condition to a marriage negotiation, one must look to practice, in

149 which a successful negotiation serves as the means for mutual acknowlegement of the

validity of status claims.

These works help toprovide a South Sulawesi-focused context fo r understanding

the normativepre ssure on kin groups to ensure that women take care that their status not

fa ll. Inthe literature on South Sulawesi, though, women often appear as littlemore than a

"symbol" which can, if sufficiently high, provide access to office fo r relatives, or, if

lowered somehow, may negatively impactthe status strivings of male kin. The storyof

the princess bride has something to interject in this story, particularly in cases where

scholars base their historical analyses on royal genealogies. Bulbeck (1996), fo r instance,

shows that marriage alliances were central to the successes of Makassarese political and

social rivalries, because the abilityto attract wives indexed power: "The more powerful

the patrilineal royalty, the larger its fo llowing of attached noble patrilines"; "securing the

patrilineal succession stimulated political expansion, to such a degree that the power of any monarch was closely related to his number of wives" (Bulbeck 1996: 311}.

Yet, how were wives "attracted" and marriage alliances fo rmed? It would be a mistake to thinkthat this was always, or even usually, a process devoid of coercion, particularly in the context of political expansion. With this thought, the story of the princess bride's emphasis on the matriline, reminding Sarna descendants of their worthiness, takes on the tone of a counter-discourse vis a vis those with greater means to represent the patrilineal bias of descent reckoning in the upper echelons of these staunchly cognatic societies.

Caldwell states that in Bugis kingdoms, while genealogies and chronicles show a patrilineal bias in the appointment of rulers, especially at the highest levels, eligibility fo r

ISO political office, in other words, high ascriptive status, was provided by women (Caldwell

1995: 407-8). I find Caldwell's analysis of royal genealogies interesting fo r it shows that 1h prior to Islamization and the turmoil of the late 17 century, elite marriage patterns

demonstrate peninsular integration, while after this point there is a much higher degree of

marriage between kingdoms (and presumably then, also between descent groups). Yet, as

with Bulbeck's analysis, there is really no way to tell here how these marriage alliances

came about. These scholars are perfectly aware that genealogies are elite productions that

in the case of kingdoms aim to legitimate rulership. Yet analysis of these genealogies -

these theoretical statements of social relationships - seem to slip all too easily into presumptions of practice. I have great sympathy fo r the limitations of the sources, but I do not think this allows us to turn ablind eye to the fact that they do not represent how alliances were formed in practice, a point that might make some "alliances," at least,

170 appear as something else indeed.

On the one hand, there is room for criticism of how royal genealogies may be used to represent historical processes. On the other hand, to see narratives like those I have analyzed above, narratives away from "centers" of cultural production, as knowing

170 The basic point is really Bourdieu's, about the use scholars have made of the lineage model: Native theories are dangerous not so much because they lead research towards illusory explanations as because they bring quite superfluousre inforcement to the intellectualist tendency inherent in the objectivist approach to practices. This academicism of the social "art" of living which, having extractedfrom the op us operatum the supposed principles of its production, sets them up as norms explicitly governingpract ices (with phrases like "good form requires ... ", "custom demands ...", etc.), take away understanding ofthe logic of practice in the very moment it tries to offer it. For example, the ideological use many societies make of the lineage model and, more generally, of genealogical representations, in order to justifY and legitimate the establishedorder (e.g. by choosing the moreorthod ox of two possible ways of classifYinga marriage), would doubtless have become apparent to anthropologists at an earlier date if the theoretical use they themselves make of this theoretical construct had not prevented them from inquiring into the functions ofgene alogies and genealogists, and thereby from seeing the genealogyas the theroetical census of the universe of theoretical relationships within which individuals or groups definethe real space of(in both senses) practical relationships in terms of their conjunctural interests (Bourdieu 1977:19).

151 "resistance" or "emulation" -which one really cannot do without a reasonable picture of

the sociological contexts of their production - risks naively conferring rather more

deliberate agency than may be warranted (cf. Cummings 2001 b). Nor should these

cultural products, clearly connected to regional ideologies about status and kinship, be

taken as evidence of the "mentality" of a group of people, or of what is "in the minds" of

"natives."

While the story of the princess bride is not a representation of how marriages

came about in practice (although it is constituted through narrative practices), the story

does present this theme in allegory, in other words, through a prolonged metaphor in

which mention of the principal subject or lesson is suppressed.

Burghoom did not see the allegory, and the differences between his version and

the others is too great, and too Dutch, to call his "j ust another" version of the story. The

narrative messages that he seems to have missed were not, however, secret; they were

merely implicit. He missed them because he did not have the tools at his disposal to read

their implications. In other narrative traditions of Southeast Asia, in stories one may

consider, broadly speaking, to be political allegory, one finds the use of similarnarra tive

practices which work through culturally-specific structures of implication and the subtle

abilityto read indirectness, ambivalence and metaphor. 171 For instance, the Malay

hikayat's transposition of history to heroic biography reveals in the process a hidden

didactic message (Braginsky 1990: 410), and the Javanese technique ofpase mon, which

may be translated as "covered information" (Moertono 1981 [ 1968]: 19 in Sears 1996: 8),

refers to the use of a story "asa subtle caricature of reality (that) ...serves to bring the

171 On the related topic of "political myths," which, like other mythical tales, address a structural situation that is "true" in the past, present and future, see P.E. de Josselin de Jong (1980) who discusses Levi-Strauss and others.

152 observer/hearer's attention to those domains which often lie outside the boundaries of any

particular story" (Sears 1996: 7). Allegories may not always spur people to engage in

deliberate comparison of particular instances, but they are nevertheless available as a

resource that helps people to make sense out of situations, especially those of moral

quandary.

Many people who claim descent from high status Sarna lineages in Southeast

Sulawesi, the Gulf of Bone and the Flores Sea are fa miliar with at least abbreviated

versions of the story of the princess bride. For them, the story is intimately tied to their

social positions, both through restricted access to lontaraq manuscripts in general, and restricted ciruclation of such narratives in practice. As with the narratives of other people in Sulawesi who have had to contend with the expansionary aims and status claims of powerful others, the storyof the princess bride uses kinship as a metaphor fo r political relations (Cummings 2001b). Yet kinship is more than just a metaphor here, fo r kinship has also provided a mode or a meansthrough which some have tried to establish their social and political power over others.

In fact, my learning the fe el and texture of euphemism in these stories comes not just from reading them comparatively, but also from doing research on how Sarna people

"make history" in the present, that is, with how they tied their lived experience to what they fo und significant in the remembered past. As I learned more about a particularly notorious unnegotiated union, I gained insight into just how the allegorical significance of the story of the princess bride might reach beyond the narrative to become part of the interpretive context fo r real-life events. In chapter six, I examine how Sarna people

153 responded to and recalled this particular coerced union, this "kidnapping" and marriage of a Sarna womanto a Bugis rebel commander during the Darul Islam conflictof the 1950's.

Reading Sarnastories of the past comparatively, one glimpses how processes of euphemization turn coercion and subordination into accident and coincidence, thus making room for the contestation of social inequality. Most other people in the region seem unaware that such degrees of stratification exist among the predominantly poor people of the strand. Yet, through these tales Sarna people assert a claim to legitimate and equivalent recognition of a distinctly Sarna high status lineage. The story's kelong, which reminds her son of his maternal lineage, also reminds the audience - composed primarily of people who view her as an ancestor- of their descent as well.

The story of the princess bride deals allegorically with the potential danger of unions that are notmutua lly negotiated beforehand and which are,then, unable to confer mutual status recognition through social practice. Such unions are not "supposed" to happen, but they do. In their subtle, backhanded way, the stories also illustrate, however, that in evaluating someone's standing, there is, even in theory, some room fo r ambivalence because evaluationhappens in practice. The importance of the acknowledgement of status in practice is echoed by the verymaterial existence of lontaraq manuscripts, both those containing such stories as well as those comprised of other sorts of writing. Many lontaraq appear to have been produced andconf erred fo r this purposeof acknowledgement and recognition, and they are certainly bequeathed with such legitimizing aims in mind. In the chapter that fo llows, chapter five, I examine how

Sarna owned manuscripts are treated as objects in social practice.

154 Chapter S

Looking fo r /ontaraq

In this chapter, I examine what Bugis language manuscripts - both rumored and apparent - are doing among coastal Sarnacommunities of Sulawesi. My first inkling that lontaraq manuscripts had any importance to Sarnapeople came through my visits to Lo

Kader's house on the eastern edge of the Straits ofTiworo. When I first started asking about the Sarna past, people in Lagasa outside of Raha had mentioned that I should go and see him. The stories Lo Kader told about the Sarna past were based on a manuscript that his father had owned, but which, he said, had gotten burned in the 1950's during the

DI-TII conflict. This manuscript had, according to his nephew, Kamaruddin, been one of fo ur such lontaraq that were rumored to exist.

I located one of these manuscripts in 1990. It had been mentioned in a conversation that my sponsor at the time, an anthropologist from the local University, was having one evening with a colleague. 172 They were actually chatting about the story

-as they knew of it, probably from published sources - of the Sarna princess fr om Johor.

Already curious about the Sarnapast, I was intrigued by their speculations about whether

172 Namely, Abdurrauf Tarimana (almarhum), later Rector of Haluoleo University, and his colleague, Muslim in Su'ud, whom I continued to visit in later years and whose generosity and openness about experiences in the 1950's taught me much about 01-TII. Pak Raufwas a Tolaki man and Muslimin Su'ud is as well, I think. Both came from peninsular Southeast Sulawesi rather than from the coasts or offshore islands.

155 the storywas simply a Sarnaort eff to connect themselves with the successors to a once-

great maritime kingdom (Srivijaya), or whether there might indeed be a historical

connection between this story and the dispersal of Malays fo llowing the surrender of

Malacca to the Portuguese in 1511. The colleague turned to me and mentioned that he

actually had Sarna relatives, in-laws up the coast in the village of Lemobajo, who, in fact,

owned a manuscript. Perhaps, I thought, what was in this manuscript could shed light on

the questions they were discussing and I expressed some interest in seeing it. Yes, we

should take a trip up there, the colleague said, rather like someone might say, "we'll do

coffee," meaning it, but in a non-committal way.

Over the course of my first months in and out of Sarna villages in Tiworo, when I

passed through the provincial capital Kendari, I would ask him again about this

manuscript. Nothing concrete came of my asking, so I finally mentioned, offhandishly,

that I was planning to make a trip up to Lemobajo myself. Seeing that I was serious, he

very kindly found a young but responsible male relative who would be able to escort me

to the right place and give me an introduction to its owners. It was a lesson in, among

other things, the advisability of going through a kin connection when making inquiries

about manuscripts.

The manuscript, a roughly 300-page codex in Bugis kept in a worn red velvet

pouch, had been inherited by an elderly woman named Molana. 173 She was the youngest

child in a large Sarna family, and had received it, along with other heirloom objects, from

her mother, also the youngest among her own siblings. 174 Although her family came by the manuscript throughMolana's lineage, she herself was not literate and when we sat in

173 On the codex and the parameters of this study, see page I I 5, note I 31 above. 174 These objects included, among other things, a most unusual example of the Sama banner, the ulo-ula, as well assome traditional weapons. Space does not allow a detailed discussion of these objects here.

156 the frontroom discussing it, her husband, Haji Mahmud, did most of the talking. With

their explicit permission, I was allowed to photocopy this manuscript, one copy for

myself and another for them. This is the manuscript that I now refer to as Lontaraq Bajo

Lemobajo, or LB Lemobajo for short.

In my efforts to make sense of such manuscripts as social objects and to

understand theirdissemination, I findI share many concerns with those who work on

exchange and material culture. For instance, I am interested in the perceived qualities of

lontaraq manuscripts as things, the relationships between these things and the people

who keep and claim them, and the different types of networks in which they circulate -

what some might call different "regimes of value" (Appadurai 1986). To situate

manuscripts within such entanglements is to glimpse the histories of which they are a

part, histories that are, as Nicholas Thomas says, linked but not necessarily shared

(Thomas 1997: 13).

Obviously linked to South Sulawesi historiesof textuality, lontaraq about the

Sarnapast are also, as the last chapter illustrated, clearly related to Sarnanarra tives of the

past in other parts of the archipelago beyond the sway ofBugis and Makassarese cultural production. Yet, inadd ition to the question of how their entextualization came about and how they are connected to theregion's literary history, Sama-owned manuscripts are also entangled withBugis and Makassarese histories inother ways. Precisely how is a complex matter, though, and one preferably not approachedthrough a reductivemethod that would merely co-opt or incorporate them into a South Sulawesi-centered approach to lontaraq. Just what histories these lontaraq are part of calls instead for anexamination of relevant examplesthat may reach beyond these confinesto look at how they have been

157 treated in practice. Examples of lontaraq manuscripts in Sarnapractice are, however,

unfortunately few, for reasons I discuss below. Nonetheless, what one hopes to gain from

such examples - and fromref erence to them - is evidence of the social relations that

structure the networks in which these manuscripts have circulated, and in which they

. have found significance as objects or as particular kinds of documents. For, as we shall

see below, their textual authority relies not so much on the qualities they might have, but

rather manifests itself through practices specific to how they circulate, in particular, the

ways in which people inherit and lend manuscripts in order to claim or confer political

authority or status. Before we go further to look at examples of this, however, it is

necessary to explain a bit more about what lontaraq are.

Lontaraq, which are also treated as heirloom objects among the Bugis and

Makassarese (Cummings 2001a, 2002),175are texts or compilations of texts in a brahmi-

derived script of South Sulawesi. One script referred to as "old Mak.assarese" was used to

write in Mak.assarese, while a more recent, related and somewhat simplified script has

been usedto write both Bugis and Mak.assar languagetexts, and was occasionally used

fo r Mandar as well. 176 While the word lontaraq itself derives from the lontar palm leaves

on which people once wrote, examples of such manuscripts, the leaves joined end to end

and spooled up like a roll offilm, arevery rare indeed. Most extant lontaraq, written on paper, are fromthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Macknight andCaldwell 2001:

140).

175 As with genealogies of high status families in the Malays world: "It is by no means unusual for Malay royal genealogies to be treated as precious objects and heirlooms" (Drakard 1986:52). I mentioned that LB Lemobajo was wrapped in a red velvet pouch. Drakard also notes that, "Observers have notices that such �enealogies might be wrapped in cloth and treated as part of the state regalia" (Drakard 1986:52). 76 There are also Makassarese lontaraq in an Arabic orthography known as "tulisan serang" and small amounts ofthis, possibly "Seram writing," also appear in various lontaraq of the peninsula written predominantly in the brahmi-derived scripts. Old Makassarese is also called ''jangang-jangang," in other words something like chicken scratch or claws, perhaps fo r its general appearance.

158 Lontaraq partake of a copyist traditionin which manuscriptswere re-inscribed,

sometimes with interlineal or marginal notes, sometimes with simple additions to or

omissions from a text, yet also, in some genres, with more substantial content variation

between texts that treated more or less the same subject matter. Almost nothing, however,

is known from direct evidence about the actual circumstances in which manuscripts were

produced or in which reinscription took place (Macknight and Caldwell 2001: 145). It

can, moreover, be extremely difficultto date particularve rsions of texts, given traditions

of both written and oral transmission, with many if not most texts known in both

versions, each borrowing elements from the other (Pelras 1979; Cummings 2003).

Inthe corpusof South Sulawesi writings, Bugis materials make up the lion's

share, with a huge range of genres - frompoetry and myths to books oflaw, court diaries,

chronicles and more. It is not for nothing that Koolhof refers to Bugis cutlure as

"radically manuscript oriented" (Koolhof 1999: 363). Nonetheless, although there are

roughly two and a half million speakers of Bugis, the script used in lontaraq has largely

fallen out of use, and trulyprac ticed readers of literary andhistorical texts are now

relatively rare.

Some literacy in Bugis is also fo und among older Sarna women and men. A

numberof Sarnapeople inthe region who were at least old enough to remember events in

World War Two were capable of reading and writing Bugis. Below are four examples

(though I encountered more}, including some indication of the age and location of each

Sarna person mentioned. Location is important because they were each - when I met them and when they were quite young - at some distance from the South Sulawesi peninsula and its centers of Bugis population and culture. First,a few years afterI

159 photocopied LB Lemobajo, I visited a fo rmervilla ge head from Pulo Balu, who had led

the re-establishment of the village on that island around 1965 when the Tiworo Straits

again became secure after DI-Til. Not long before my visit, a relative had apparently

come to his current home on the northwest coast ofMuna, and had given him some

photocopied pages, almost certainly of LB Lemobajo, fromwhich he read passages to me.

Second, on the easternside of the Gulf of Bone, north of Kolaka, I met a Sarnawoman,

Lo Hawi, who remembered fleeing Dutch demands for corvee labor to build a harbor

jetty at Kolaka well before World War Two. She code switched fluently between Sarna

and Bugis, and mentioned that she had learned to read Bugis as a result of koranic study

(ngaj i) when she was young. Third, in an island in the Pulau Sembilan group in the

western Gulf of Bone, an elderly Sarna woman, Haji Kua, originally from Tiworo, used

Bugis to keep track of goods sold in her small kios or sundries shop. 177 Her youngest

daughter, who recorded transactions in Indonesian and could not read the Bugis writing,

found this practice mildly frustrating.178 Finally, in Tiworo, on Pulo Balu, another woman

who recalled World War Two, Lo Haila, said she used to read Bugis, and that people had

used it for writing letters. These were not government letters, but were letters carried by

or between traders, sent from otherTiworo islands such as Pulo Katela or Pulo Maginti.

As I was aware that Bugis traders also lived in the Straits before the war, I asked whether

it had been Bugis people, then, who had written these letters. Lo Haila clarified, after a

177 "Haji," which indicates that one has done the pilgrimage to Mecca, is often used, in the regions of my research, in a non-gender-specificmanner. 178 I myself was somewhat amused by the fact that they were both diligent about noting down goods sold and amountsthey sold fo r, since, although they were able to do a numerical tally, they could not in this manner keep track of inventory, fo r neither was literate in the writing system of the other.

160 long pause, that even Sarnapeople used the Bugis language fo r written

communication. 179

These examples of literacy in Bugis among Sarna people suggest that the present

significance of Bugis-language lontaraq kept as heirloom objects by Sarna people does

not rely on a fe tishization of texts based on the novelty of the technology of writing. As

these examples suggest, Sarnapeople of Sulawesi's southern littoral - in areas outside of

South Sulawesi - used Bugis in koranic study, and in Tiworo, also as a language of letter

writing and trade before World War Two. Unlike work that fo cuses on the production

and literate use of texts in relation to centers of rule and divine kingship, as Reid suggests

- although he delivers the remark in relation to upland, inland people in out-of-the-way

places - what is in need of study are "the principles of social organization which enabled

Indonesians to develop sophisticated written cultures without states (Reid 1998: 28)," or

at least, beyond their effective reach. Sarna literacy in Bugis remains virtually

unexamined, however, in large part due to the fact that researchers have repeatedly failed

to find evidence of manuscripts, or the manuscripts they sought, in Sarna hands.

It is not fo r lack of trying. Efforts to find Sama-owned lontaraq go back at least to

James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak and Governorof Labuan, during his mostly coastal

explorations of Borneo and Celebes. In April 1840, his diaries tell us, Brooke departed

the "Chinrana" river in Bone, and before he set sail northward again to fo llow the coast of

the Gulf, he sent "to Bajue for a Bajow pilot" and a loan of money. Not only did he get

179 Lo Haila, Pulo Balu, 6 April 2000 (tape #63). She thus implied that the letters were also to or from Sarna people. Her father, Haji Usman, had been a Sarnatrader based in Pulo Balu, but the extent to which other Sarna people worked as traders has been difficultto gauge. I have seen no extant examples of these letters, although given the degree of village burning, flightand displacement from the Straits in the 1950's, this is not terribly surprising. There is no evidence that lontaraq scripts have been used to write in Sarna, except fo r an unwitnessed mention by Brooke, discussed below. Also see page 89 above.

161 the loan, and a pilot, but also a "laleran Bajow" - in other words a gel/arang, a person of

high status descent - "a sensible old man" who, in response to Brooke's questions,

provided a brief oral account of Bajo relocation in the past. 18° From him Brooke also

learnedthat, "They have no distinct written characters, but use either the Malay or Bugis

in their books of law and regulations, the language being Bajow" (Brooke 1848: 151 ).

Brooke attempted to find examples of such texts. He was well aware that a

number of South Sulawesi realms had chronicles, and in February that same year had not

only been shown one but also took a copy of an extract from it (Brooke 1848: 100-101).

By March, however, he reported in his diary:

During my stay I have been anxiously inquiring for manuscripts, but without success; and I am inclined to believe that Dr. Leyden, in the list he gives of Bugis works, has been misled by the exaggeration of the natives. The lontarahs, several volumes, ofthe voyages and adventures of Sawira Gading {Sawerigading}, and some books of sayings of their wise men are all I could hear of... however this refers to Wajo alone. Luwu, as the most ancient state and the birthplace of their traditional hero, may be richer in literature. 181

180 This high status man provided a story, sans princess, in reply to Brooke's questions "respecting the traditionary accounts of the origin of the Bajow race," according to which the Bajow emigrated fr om:

Minangkabu {sic.}, under the command of a young rajah, a relation of the royal fam ily. Arriving in Bugisland, they were hospitably received by the king of Goa, who assigned the young prince an island fo r his residence and kingdom. From him and his fo llowers sprung the Bajow race; but their island being small, they soon betook themselves to their boats, and

like the original princes, sought a home and riches on the sea (Brooke 1848: 151) .

In light of the previous chapter, one cannot help but wonder ifthe usual princess figure got lost somewhere in translation. Brooke also notes that "The Bajow ofBugis are all under the command of one or other of three chiefs, called lollos, below these is the title of lateran" (1848: 152). Similar information in Pelras ( 1972) remains unsourced, but could have come from Sarna informants in the western gulf of Bone. In Tiworo and up the east coast, the (Bugis) term gel/orang or galla is not known. Lolo is widely used among Sarna people throughout the entire region to designate descendants of high status Sarna lineages. The term punggawa, fa mliar in many parts of the archipelago, is recognized in Tiworo as an office, before colonial rule, more or less equivalent to a village head, and fo r which being a lo/o conferred eligibility. 181 Brooke (1848: 1 16). Wajo is a Bugis kingdom, no connection to "Bajo." The copy ofthe excerpt Brooke acquired was from "the Lontarah ofWajo (1848: 100-101). The editor of the diaries notes that "The rajahs bestowed the name of Saurra Gading on Mr. Brooke; a delicate piece of flattery" (Brooke 1848: 1 16).

162 Brooke held out hopes for findingmore manuscripts, but given the lack of success he reported thus far with the Bugis, we are not surprised that he should write, after his meeting with the "lateran Bajow" in April:

I tried in vain to procure one of these books {of law}, as it would be curious to obtain the maritime code of a maritime people - without a country, whose home is their prahu, and whose livelihood is gained by collecting the produce of the sea and shores of distant islands. We may presume that laws made to suit such a state of society would be peculiar.182

But such texts were not to be had, nor any others, fr om "the Bajow."

Searching fo r manuscripts among Sarnapeople was not something, it turned out, that I shared with Brooke alone. As I fo llowed the trails of hearsay about these objects fr om one place to another, I discovered that my path intersected with those of others who had done something similar before me. Much of the time, like Brooke and these others, I fe lt as though I were fo llowing objects that had an existence more in rumor than in fact.

Yet I knew that Sarnatalk about owning lontaraq manuscripts was not mere rumor, ruse, or collective delusion, as I had been launched into this curious pursuit by photocopying, some years earlier, precisely the kind of manuscript which I later learnedothers had looked fo r unsuccessfully.

Networks and intersections

A useful place to begin to conceptualize the entanglements of lontaraq is to borrow an insight from Denys Lombard, a scholar of the pasisir or coastal zone in

Southeast Asia interested in using literature to study social history. Lombard once

182 Brooke (1848: 151-152).

163 cautioned against treating the region as a jigsaw puzzle or a patchwork of descent groups,

each with its language, literature, rituals, territory and specialists. Such an approach, he

said, was particularlyunsuitable in the case of the Malays, Bugis and Javanese, who, in

the course of ages, have constructed vast networks on the scale of the entire archipelago

(Lombard 1986: 19-20).183 Against the image of a patchwork, he posed, in contrast, the

pasisir or coastal zone, and in so doing facilitates our ability to envision networks spread,

albeit unevenly, over time and through space across the archipelago.

In my examination of Bugis-language manuscripts owned by Sarnapeople I ask

the reader to bear in mind this contrast between the spatial metaphors of patchworks and

networks. Seen through the image of a patchwork, Sarna"s ea people" -who have no

mythologized, ideologically primordial attachment to a particular piece of land - appear

as a kind of ethnic anomaly. There is, however, no such sense of anomaly about them and

the way they are scattered throughout Island Southeast Asia, when one conceptualizes

this fa ct through the different networks that historically, and currently, link these coasts

with one another. Lontaraq manuscripts are entwined in some of these networks. It is

important to remember this, fo r slipping back into the metaphor of patchworks results in

a misleading view of Sarna /ontaraq practices as an oddly dispersed fo rm of

"localization."

Nevertheless, as though the image of the patchwork archipelago were hard to

shake, a Bugis-language manuscript among Sarnapeople does seem a little like matter out of place, despite the fact that some older Sarna people are able to read Bugis. It seems somehow "off," in other words, to encounter the past of one group written in the language

183 In the case of Java, it appears, early networks reached considerably beyond this archipelago, according to recent research by Ann Kumar. See the research report she provides in the liA S Newsletter 34 (July 2004).

164 of another. And the sense of matter out of place is not helped by the fa ct that such

"matter" - actual manuscripts, whether narratives of the past or other genres - certainly

seem to be in place on only the rarest of occasions. That is, tantalizingly hard to locate

but rumored to exist, claims to lontaraq ownership are fa r more abundant than actual

manuscripts.

There are various reasons fo r this. Some manuscripts have simply disintegrated

with age in the tropical climate. 184 Others have gotten lost or destroyed in flight fr om one

place to another. And sometimes, as Brooke fo und, the hyperbole of description

overstretches one's capacity fo r credulity. Yet claims to ownership can also be hard to

substantiate because access to these heirloom objects, which index high status descent, is

often closely guarded.

I began to get a sense of this when I went to Pulo Kambuno, an island in the

Sembilan group in the western Gulf of Bone offSinjai. I had not originally planned to

venture that far west from the Straits ofTiworo. However, when I was doing research in

the Makassar branch of the National Archives, 185 I was set on a manuscript trail by a

young man working there. Of both Bugis and Bajo parentage, he said his grandfather had

owned one, and that it was supposed to be in Kambuno.

On my way to Kambuno, I hitched a boat ride fromSinjai to the nearest of the

offshore islands, and there I met a Sarnawoman, Haji Leang, who said that her mother,

Haji Kua, lived in Kambuno and possessed a lontaraq. HajiLeang knew there wasa

184 Including LB Lemobojo, which, sadly, was nearly in tatters when I had another look at the original in 2000. Increased handling may have contributed to this. On a related note, when I finallytracked down someone who knew where some old local government record had been kept, I heard a story of how !lll the documents in the cabinet (lemorz) had turned to dust. I thought this was figurative language at first, but it was very clearlyreiterated. Bookworms and other critters plus the moist hot climate wreaked their havoc. 185 At that point the city of Ujung Pandang had not yet revertedto its old name with its colonial spelling.

165 lontaraq because she herself had carried it ina bamboo tube from Tiworo, when, as a

small girl in the 1950's, she fledthe fightingof the Darul Islam rebellion. I thought that perhaps this might be the same lontaraq on whose trail I was set by the young man in the archives, but this turned out not to be the case. In fact, that trail dead-ended in Kambuno and I was glad to have picked up another. Haji Leang encouraged me to go stay with her mother, and as far as I was concerned, "Tell her I sent you" was a fine stand-in for a personal introduction.

The following day, when I stepped offthe local version of semi-public transportation and waded through the shallows of Kambuno, I asked the first people I saw for directions to Haji Kua's house. These happened to be three small boys running about the beach. I increased my chances of finding her quickly by yelling out to the boys, in

Sarna, to ask if they spoke Sarna. One of the three stopped in his tracks. The other two obviously had not understood a thing I said fo r they kept playfully running inland from the beach without so much as a pause to disappear between the stilt-houses. This interesting tidbit oflinguistic pragmatics told me a lot about Kambuno's local social dynamics. Presuming that theother twoboys were Bugis - close as we were to predominantly Bugis areas of the South Sulawesi peninsula - this interaction indicated it was likely that the Bugis people in Kambuno almost certainly did not speak Sarna. I asked the boy who had stopped if he knewwhere Haj i Kua lived, and as he did know, I gratefully followed him to her house.

As curious friends and fam ily crowded in to investigate the stranger - a fe w shy young teenagers hanging just outside the open door - I waited patiently fo r the usual front-room tea scene to ensue. I wasn't there ten minutes beforethe elderly Haji Kua, who

)66 I thought had gone off to see to the requisite tea, reappeared and literally threw down on the coffee table before me an offprint of a 1972 article by Christian Pelras.

In 1968, Pelras and an official from the Indonesian Department of Culture went looking fo r a manuscript about Sarnahi story said to be owned by Haji Kua's husband,

1 6 Beddu Satang. 8 He initially told Pelras that it had been burnt during theconflict of the

1950's. However, Pelras and his government fr iend, unconvinced, finallymanaged to get him to show them his lontaraq. Pelras described it as an old document, enclosed in bamboo, which, according to the owner, had belonged to his grandparents. In it, Fatimah

Banri, who ruled Bone from 1871 to 1895, declared that whosoever came to the aid of the possessor of these lines came to the aid of the ruler of Bone (Pelras 1972: 153-154 ).

I, too, was initially put off from seeing this testimonial. Nonetheless, I returned to

Haji Kua's house more than once over the next fe w months. Although I had more or less given up on this /ontaraq as unimportant and rationalized not seeing it with the knowledge that I could refer to Pelras' article, I returned to her house anyway. Not because I held out excessive hope of being granted the opportunity to see it - I thought it quite likely that it no longer existed - but because I had other matters to attend to in

Kambuno, and as long as I was there and she welcomed me, I was simply grateful fo r the relief of living in a household where - her husband having passed away quite a few years earlier - there were no men who ordered or simply expected the women to serve them.

There was just Haji Kua and her and three grown daughters. Eventually, on one of these subsequent stays and rather out of the blue, Haji Kua showed me the testimonial and allowed her youngest daughter to accompany me to Sinjai in order to photocopy it.187

186 Or: Abdulsalang. Pelras mistakes his brother, Abdulsaleng, fo r the owner. 187 I have more to say about this document below.

167 As we saw above with Brooke, looking fo r manuscripts in Sulawesi is not a new

pursuit. We know, in addition, that in the nineteenth century, Europeans and Malays alike

complained of the difficulty of locating Malay texts. It appears, moreover, that there were

intersections between Sulawesi and Malay worlds of textual interest and pursuit. For

instance, a manuscript of the Muslim heroic legend Hikayat Raja Handak reveals that one

"KarlTelolo" inMakassar arranged for a scribe to travel to Semarang - in Java - to make

a copy of the manuscript there as early as 1797 (Proudfoot and Hooker 1996: 77). This

remarkable example shows that in the late eighteenth century, in addition to Europeans

and Malays, other people, from Sulawesi, were also willing to go to great lengths to

188 obtain certain manuscripts, even manuscripts in Malay.

Manuscript circulation

Up until the nineteenth century, manuscripts were not objects of commerce. For

instance, in Cummings' argument thatthe coming of Islamto Makassar was largely a matter of texts, he states that how these texts were treated depended greatly on attitudes and practices already at play in relation to Makassar language lontaraq. Much like the ones that concern me, these /ontaraq were closely guarded objects that recorded and testified to one's status and links to legendary ancestors (Cummings 2001a: 560, 562,

188 "Kari Telolo" is clearly a southern Sulawesi name. "Kari" is the Makassarese title of"karaeng," in this morphophonemic context the final consonant is dropped and a glottal stop or anotherIt/ would be geminated. Cf. the (Bugis) combination of Arung + Palakka (the Arung of Palakka), which in speech becomes Aruppalakka. While "Kari" or "karaeng" here indicates some parentage from a high-status Makassarese lineage, "Telolo" may indicate something else besides simply a name. Possibly an alternate spelling of to-lolo, as the vowel of the first syllable is unstressed, to-lolo could mean (in Bugis) a "young person," or someone in a subordinate ruling position; or, (in Sarna) to-Jolo could mean a "person who is Jolo'' or ofhigh status Sarnalin eage. Yet this person is obviously from Sulawesi. Such "contractions" of titles with names are also common in Sarna: e.g., Puah Lebbi -7 Pellebbi; Puah Janni -7 Panjanni.

168 564).189 Proudfoot and Hooker indicate that before the 19th century, most Malay manuscripts were embedded in the social relations of "court or cloister," and access to them was governedby those relationships. Texts of dynastic histories, fo r instance, or of potent religious knowledge, could only be handled by experts whose knowledge matched the contents. They also note that "owners of manuscripts of recreational literature" did lend them, although not fo r pecuniaryreward , and that these owners were anxious about their care and eventual return. On a blank page of a nineteenth century copy of the

Hikayat Hang Tuah, fo r instance, there is a note in a different hand from the text indicating that the manuscript belonged to the Sultan of Pahang (who ruled in the 1890's).

The note asks whoever might borrow themanuscript to return it quickly. Apparently, social proprieties made it hard to press for the return of property {Proudfoot and Hooker

1996: 77). But which social proprieties were these - the authors do not specify- and why should they have made it hard to press fo r the return of manuscripts? What, more importantly, were the relationships that may have structured the "lending"?190

This depiction of Malay literature makes it sound asthough "serious" texts were embedded in social relations and governed by restricted access, while "recreational" texts could be lent out but were hard to get back. What I fo und in contemporary Sarnasettings,

189 Cummings (200 la) also states that they were spiritually potent objects. Speaking of the present, I fo und that this attitude toward manuscripts was less obviously apparent among my Sarna informants than it was among some elite Bugis families and ritual specialists I met in the northern reaches of the Gulf of Bone, especially in the Ussuq Bay region of the Gulfs northeast comerand in Malili as well. I must also note mention of earlier manuscripts going from Makassarto Johore: "the enthusiasm with which the Johore courtgreeted the 'history brought from Goa', that is,the 1536 version of the Malay Annals" (P.E.de Josselin de Jong I 964: 241 ). 190 Partof why the authors donot specifythis is probably due to the constraints of space in this remarkable book by Ann Kumar and John H. McGlynn (1996), with fantastic plates and contributions by many experts. Ona related note, re:circulation of manuscripts, Schulte Nordholt ( 1994: 246) mentions that from the 1950's through the 1970's there wasa proliferation of publications of Balinese babad - written genealogical narratives thatfunction as genealogical charters explaining a group's origin and descent - and "many more were edited and transcribed or ciruclate in stencilled fo rm on a limited scale." The relevant question here is: circulate how?

169 though, was a combination of these two practices. Restricted access was generallythe

rule, basically limited to kin, through whom manuscripts fo llowed both paths of

inheritance and as well as changes of residence. Yet sometimes lontaraq were also lent out to lineage members. Inheritance and changes of residence, then, as well as occasional lending, all contributed to the circulation of texts.

Haji Kua's testimonial, for instance, was inherited by her husband from his grandparents, and in the family's flightwestward fromTiworo in the 1950's, it was entrusted, rather than lent out, to their young daughter (for who would suspect a young girl of carrying an important document?). This lontaraq proved to be a document that was only shown to outsiders with great reluctance. Similarly, LB Lemobajo was also passed on through inheritance and transported through changes of residence. It was inherited through the youngest living child in each generation, a practice confirmed not only by Molana and her husband when I first saw the manuscript, but also at a later date

191 by a nephew ofMolana's. Molana's mother was Hindong, and she may have lived in

Bajoe, although according to another of Hindong's daughters, she was born in Pulo

192 Maginti, in the western Straits ofTiworo. In either case, this means that whereas Haji

Kua's testimonial travelled west from Tiworo across the Gulf ofBone, LB Lemobajo at some point travelled eastward through the Straits and up a substantial stretch of the east

193 coast of Southeast Sulawesi. While both of these lontaraq were almost certainly

191 Haji M. Ramli, who grew up in Lemobajo, mentionedthis to me in 2000 while on a visit to Raha to welcome home the new Haji's: "Mana yang termuda, itu yang dikasi. " He is the child of one of Molana's older sisters, Lo Kambang (tieldnotes, Raha, IS April 2000). This ultimogeniture was not referred to as a rule; nonetheless, in practice it minimizedthe number of generationsal inheritances. 192 Haji Sitti Alang, this other daughter ofHindong (a.k.a. Nindong), specified her mother's birthplace (fieldnotes, Boepinang, II April 2000). Haji Sitti Alang may also have been called Lo Pati, and was, in addition to Lo Kambang, another of Molana's older sisters. 193 Exactly when this happened is unclear. Although, asmentioned, Hindong- who inherited LB Lemobajo -wasprobably born in Pulo Maginti at the western end ofTiworo, it is not clear where or when she met

170 produced in Bone, 194 the point here is to examine how they have been treated in practice, and in particular how they passed hands from generation to generation and from place to place.

The comparative ease with which I was able to view LB Lemobajo initially made it hard for me to appreciate the dimension of restricted access. This initial lack of restriction was due at least in part to the fact that on my first trip I was accompanied by a relative of the people who possessed it. If I had not been, there would probably have been considerable reluctance to show me the manuscript, and it is extremely unlikely that they would have agreed to bring it to the provincial capital where we could meet in order to have it photocopied. While it is true that the accompanying relative helped smooth the way, other factors may also have contributed, factors involving the particularities of whose lineage the manuscript was inherited through (Molana's maternal side), and who it was (Haji Mahmud) that nevertheless managed others' access to it. In other words, while the lontaraq had been passed to Molana and really reflectedthe status of her maternal lineage, Haji Mahmud, by controlling access to it, bolstered his own prestige. It must also

her husband, Lo Aco, or where they lived once married. It does, however seem likely that the manuscript left Bajoe in the early part of the twentieth century. I discuss the details of this later in the chapter. 194 Not, however, simply because they are in Bugis: the testimonial because it bears the seal of Fatimah Banri, LB Lemobajo because of the history of its inheritance path and because episodes of it not analyzed here bear a relation the Chronicle of Bone. The testimonial, could, one supposes, be a fo rgery -the writing implement used fo r it was not the usual type used in fo rmal Bugis documents. Proving such a thing would be next to impossible, but I raise the possibilitybecause of the seal fo und in association with the lontaraq described above on pp. 88-89, note 97. This /ontaraq was accompanied by a modem Malay translation. The latter, rather than the Bugis manuscript it translates, bears a Bugis royal seal on its last page. Given that the Malay translation was made in the 1940's, the placement of the seal raises questions about how and when the seal was "affixed." As for LB Lemobajo, which bore no seal on any extant page, there remains the possibility that it was composed away from the Bugis realms of South Sulawesi. For a comparative example, I mention the Sy air Kerajaan Bima, probably composed around 1830, with a Dutch copy dated 1857, which "is especiaiJy noteworthy because it was compiled at a great distance from the main centres of Malay influence and is a reflection of the vitalityofthese cultural traditions" (Hitchcock 1994: 178). The coasts of Flores and Sumbawa are still frequented by contemporary Sarna from Sulawesi, and numerous Sarnapeople from the western Gulf of Bone and islands to the south fled there during Dl-Til in the 1950's which extended to these islands in the middle of the Flores Sea. Still, LB Lemobajo was probably composed in or near Bone; I discuss this in greater detail later in the chapter.

171 be said that many people who visited Lemobajo since my initial trip there in 1990 have since taken Haji Mamud to be the "owner" of this manuscript. 195

Nonetheless, because things went so smoothly with my initial efforts in

Lemobajo, I was not at firstparticularly aware that access to such heirloom objects was, in principle, restricted to lineage members. Over the course of fieldwork this became clearer as a result of the reluctance with which people showed their lontaraq (when there were lontaraq to be shown), and the fa cilitating role played by other fa mily members.

Yet the dynamics of access to manuscripts and what possession of them usually signified

- a kind of "proof' of one's elite descent - applied as well to the possession of knowledge about narratives of the Sarna past. 196 I realized that knowledge of narratives about the

Sarna past, or knowledge of certain details in them, could similarly index high status descent due to an odd experience that occurred repeatedly over the course of fieldwork.

Typically, when I arrived in a new place and introduced myself to Sarna people there, I often explained, truthfully, that a particular relative theirsof had sent me, and that as I was interested in Sarna manuscripts, although I had already photocopied one, I wanted to give other Sarna families the opportunity to share theirs with me as well. I would explain about my interest in the Sarnapast, and would sometimes refer to the stories of the past with which I was fa miliar. On a number of occasions this produced a bemused and quizzical look on the partof my interlocutors. At first I thought that this was a polite expression of shock at what I was afraid might be seen as an outrageous research tactic of basically playing offthe potentials fo r interfamilialstatus rivalry. But people were

t9S From a visit ofMarhalim,the formervi llagehead ofPulo Balu, in 1996, during which he was accompanied by a number of other Sarna relatives; to a visit of the travel writer Sebastian Hope (200 I). 196Compare Hoskins on "history objects" in Kodi, a termthat includes hierloom objects and regalia, as well as her discussion of how Kodi objects were attached to narratives, ritual officesand social action ( 1993: 80� 169).

172 remarkably unconcerned with this approach. Quite to the contrary of what I fe ared they might think, the bemused, quizzical looks instead led to an, at first, flattering, and then

(with repetition), almost absurdly cliche moment of either ethnographic "acceptance," or mistaken identity. For my limited knowledge of Sama-owned lontaraq and stories about the past raised a suspicion - voiced with a tilt of the head and a twinkle in the eye - about my background. I was questioned, that is, about whether, perhaps, I myself might have some Sarnaantecedents.

Of course I disavowed any such notion. When this happened again, and again, it finally dawned on me that my knowledge had this sort of implication fo r them because of their presupposition that one had to be Sarna, and from a high-status lineage at that, in order to know about such manuscripts and their contents in any detail. And, afterall, it was not completely far -fetched to them that I might be Sarna, fo r Sarnapeople, as they are well aware, are scattered all over the place. I was regularly asked if there were Sarna people in America, to which my stock response was, "If there are any, I haven't met them yet"; true enough. But it turned out that it was also a strangely plausible response-t hat there could be Sarna people and I might not know about it, even ifI met them -given the way that sometimes, in interethnic social contexts, people selectively signal their Sarna affiliations to others who might be Sarna- in plain view but under the radarscreen, as it were,of others' awareness. Although space does not permit a full discussion of such practices here, suffice it to say that many Sarna people are familiar with the phenomenon that someone who seems not to be Sarna may well turn out to be Sarna after all; and I was not exempt from this possibility.

173 These suspicions about my background helped me to gain a more generalizable

picture of some responses Haji Mahmud had given to questions I posed in our initial

meeting: the lontaraq LB Lemobajo was not displayed, 197 it was not read publically, and

the only person in the fa mily who read it at that time was Haji Mahmud. When I asked if

he hadheard the stories before he had read them, his response was yes, that his fa ther-in-

law (Lo Aco, who was also his uncle), sometimes read it to the fa mily. That my own

growing knowledge of lontaraq and Sarnanarra tives of the past implied I might have

some elite Sarna ancestry suggested that oral transmission of stories about the Sarna past,

like the circulation of manuscripts, is also, fo r the most part, limited to Sarna fa milies of

high status descent. One can also say then, at least to some significant degree, thatthe

parameters of close kin with such lineages form the potential networks fo r the circulation

not only of manuscripts but also of narratives about the Sarna past.

Neither Haj i Kua's testimonial nor LB Lemobajo, however, was lent out to lineage

members. One lontaraq that was borrowed and travelled a considerable distance as a

result, is a manuscriptthat I have actually never seen, yet inthe end, enough cross

referencesand descriptions of it were offered and elicited to persuade me that it actually

exists. Not all of the descriptions, however, were entirely convincing. For a time, this

made it particularlydifficult to give credence to any claims about it, and like many other

claims I encountered - in Bajoe, in North Kolaka - about manuscripts that were moved,

and lost, during times of flight by Sarnapeople, this one seemed impossible to

substantiate. Ultimately, however, fo r the purposes of investigating the mobilityof

197 While other heirloom objects, however, werenot taken out publically, the ula-u/a banner, he said, was displayed for weddings, though not for funerals. This is also still done in Bajoe. Kamaruddin, however, remembers that when, as a child, his father LoThamir, passed away (in 1974), the local ula-ula where he lived in Buton had been raised.

174 lontaraq and how they are borrowed, I found that with enough different sources pointing to the same manuscript, actually seeing this lontaraq became less important than trying to figure out the path it travelled.

In the section that fo llows, I show how I pieced together �is path, and describe in detail how the particularities of lineage played a role not only inthe management of access (or apparent access) to this lontaraq, but also how descent and new unions with non-Sarnapeople figured into the rationales for manuscript borrowing. It is not simply the details of lineage that are of interest here, but how, in practice, when some people reckoned their descent, they emphasized or de-emphasized different aspects of it. For instance, efforts to downplay or simply omit the details of less prominent and non-Sarna antecedents were sometimes as impressive as the efforts made to underscore high status

Sarna descent.

Tall tales and the structure of "borrowingn

I firstheard a reference to this manuscript in K.arnbuno, where a man named

Kantoq said that the children ofMappe maybe had a lontaraq. He also mentioned, referring apparently to the same manuscript, that the lontaraq currently in Sumbawa had

198 been "taken over by" (ambil alih sama) Map¢. Since I was told, by another person, that if I wanted to see this lontaraq I should ask pennission ofMappe's child Johang, I resolved to go to the island of Kanalo Satu at the far end of the Pulau Sembilan chain, where Johang lived.

198Fieldnotes, Kantoq, Kambuno, 30 September 1999. Kantoq claimed this mansucripthad come from one of his own ancestors, "Pakampacu" or "Pakampasyu," five generations before Kantoq in genealogy notes held by Kantoq's nephew. Mappe is short for Mappiareq.

175 As usual, once someone set me upon a manuscript trail, I was immediately side- tracked. The young man who escorted me to Kanalo initially took me, upon arrival there, to the house of a closer relative of his, Madeq Ali.199 This somewhat gruff old man who lavished great affection on his pet cat "Manis" ("Sweetie"), had a lot to say about the contents of manuscripts about the Sarna past, but himself had no lontaraq. He insisted that Sarna people cameoriginally fromUssuq, a location in Luwuq at the northeast end of the Gulf of Bone, closely associated with Sawerigading and the fe lling of the Welendreng tree in I La Galigo. Clearly, this man had considerable exposure to this version of the story?00 So strongly did he insist on the connection to Ussuq, and that insiders in that region would know about the Sarnapast, that I later made a fa irly extensive side trip to visit the area around Ussuq to explore what ritual specialists and local historical memory had to say about "the Bajo." It was an interesting trip in which I learned more about

Bugis attachments to their mythical past, and it confirmed for me that Bugis lineage elites, like Sarna people in Sulawesi's southern littoral, do not generally expose their heirloom lontaraq to non-relatives. The trip did not help much, however, with Sarna perspectives on the past, since, at the time, extremely few Sarnapeople lived in that region of the Gulf.

199A.k.a Madeq log. The "e" in Madeq is a schwa and not pronouned as in the Balinese name Made. This man said that he used to watch Muhamad Jusuf (later a well-known General) swim back and fo rth between Kanalo One and Kanalo Two (two neighboring islands), in training under the Japanese during World War Two. This was unsolicited and quite remarkable, but definitelynot impossible. During the anticolonial revolution, M. Jusufhad been an anak buah or underling, ofKahar Muzakkar, the leader of the Sulawesi branch of DI-Til mentioned in the next chapter. He is also said to have led the chase in which Kahar was (�esumably) killed in the Lasolo Bay region. 2 See the previous chapter fo r a discussion of this versionof the Sarnapast compared with others. There are indeed Sarna people in the Sembilan islands whose genealogies contain Sarna elites from the region of Luwuq (or "Luhuq"), going back a mere fo ur generations. However this is not quite as far back as one might expect to go to reach the Bugis mythical era in which Sawerigading fe lled the Welendreng tree.

176 Madeq Ali was, however, able to confirmthe lead that broughtme to Kanalo. I

mentioned to him that in Kambuno I had heard aref erence to a lontaraq held by Mappe's

children and I asked him where he thought it was. He said that Makka, Mappe's brother,

brought the lontaraq to Labuanbajo (on the west end of Flores, just east of Sumbawa) and

that if there was one in Ara (near the southeast corner of South Sulawesi), it was probably

a copy (salinan) with Daeng Tiqno, Johang's half sister. Madeq Ali was under the

impression that the /ontaraq was made of bark (kulit kayu), and that it was brought to

Labuanbajo during "the time of the gangs" (waktugerombolan ), in other words, during

DI-TII in the 1950's when many people fled there fromthis area.201

When I met Johang, he, too, said that the/ontaraq his father Mappe had was made

of bark. He said, moreover, that the /ontaraq was two meters wide and three meters long and was rolled up and stored in bamboo. I was noticeably sceptical. "Precisely this lontaraq," he said, "was brought to Labuanbajo during the time of the gangs."202

Descriptions of this lontaraq would continue to vary, but that it was taken to the region of

Labuanbajo by Mappe's brother, Makka, was a piece of information that remained consistent throughtout a number of subsequent meetings. Johang himself was unable to read the lontaraq, and he suggested I go to Ara, where his brother, Johari, who he claimed knew how to read it, could tell me more about it.

In both Kanalo and Ara, the trails of manuscript hearsay I followed once again intersected with those of someone who had done something similar before me. A German

201 Fieldnotes, Madeq Ali, Kanalo Satu. 2 October 1999. Many fledto one of the area's long-established Sarnavilla ges named Burch (in Sarna, a.k.a. "Wuring"). La�u in Kanalo also said that Johang's uncle Makka had brought the lontaraq to Sumbawa. Makka is short fo r Makkatutu. 202 "Justru lontara leu/itkayu itu yang dibawa ke SIHffiMtwwaktu gerombolan. {then below "Sumbawa":} not Sumbawa, {but} LBbuanbajo, Kupang." Fieldnotes, Johang. Kanalo Satu, 3 October 1999.

177 anthropologist, Horst Liebner, who did work in the region of southern Selayar,203 had also been to see Johari who was his main informant in Ara. In his published work on fo ur oral versions of "Bajo origin stories" he summarizes Sarna narratives of the past he heard in: Apa Tana (at Selayar's southerntip), Jampea and Kayuadi (both islands south of this point), as well as an "oralversi on of the Lontaraq of Ara" (Liebner 1998). According to

Liebner, who also had not seen this lontaraq, Johari described it as about one meter square, written on leaves in gold script - a somewhat more modest image, at least in terms ofsize, than his brother Johang hadoff ered. It purportedly contained not only a genealogy of hisfa ther's family, but also parts of the royal lines of the South Sulawesi kingdoms of Gowa, Bone and Luwu (Liebner 1998: 119).

When I first met Johari, he described a lontaraq written on bark, as others had by this point as well, and while this still seemed veryunlikely to me, I was willing at least to bracket it as the sort of exaggeration common to rumor. It quickly became clearin the couse of our conversation, though, that thelontaraq his father had had was written on paper:

Johari: the original of that lontaraq is in the Netherlands. It was taken there during colonial times. Jennifer: Do you rememberwhen? Joh: I fo rget, maybe I was not bornyet. ...The original is from bark. It was carried to the Netherlands. As for the original lontaraq of Gowa, it is/they are made of lontar palm leaves. While the original lontaraq of Bone are made frombark. My uncle from Manggarai borowed it. Jen: The one made of bark? Joh: No, (thatwas) paper, butthat ear lier one (was made of bark). Jen: What was the name ofthe lontaraq? Joh: "Lontara bilang."204

203 Where (if indeed he went by the pseudonym "Mandala"), I encountered people who thought he had died when they saw his boat capsize once, and were surprised I had seen him - alive - a few months earlier. 204 Lontaraq bilang according to Matthes(1 874: 571) is dagregisters (diaries, journals). This term does not accord either with Johari's furtherdescription of the lontaraq his fatherhad had, or with the other lontaraq he refers to here (seebelow).

178 Jen: · The language? Joh: Bugis.

Here, when we first start talkingabout lontaraq, Johari brings together the

/ontaraq his father had with a number of others, mixing references to specific /ontaraq

with general statements about "original" lontaraq from Gowa and from Bone. Although it

was confusing, it appeared from this interchange that the manuscript borrowed by his

uncle was on paper after all. This exchange also left the impression that an earlier version

on bark might have existed and that it was taken to the Netherlands. It turned out,

however, that the lontaraq taken to the Netherlands was competely different from the one

possessed by his father and borrowed by his uncle, and, moreover, it had nothing to do 205 with the Sarna past nor had it been in Sarnahands.

It was not his misleading remarks so much as the way he dropped them into the

conversation, that fuelled my interest in Johari as a tukangcerita , literally a "story�teller,"

in other words, a manwith a fondness for, perhaps not exactly prevarication, but rather a

timely stretching of the truth. Looking for information about the rumored lontaraq, I

became curious to see whathe would say next, generally aimed, it is fair to say, at

boosting how his own status was perceived and recorded. Over time he retracted some

statements he made, and as I visited new places and returnedto old haunts, it became

possible to cross�check a number of things he said about this /ontaraq, at least to verify

where it had been.

205 Johari said that this lontaraq made ofbark, was, "according to history, brought to a museum" by a Dutchman who had given himself the name Daeng Mangemba; later he said that Daeng Mangemba's fa ther had brought it to the Netherlands. According to Idrus, another informant in Ara, Daeng Mangemba was a pseudonym used by the contemporary scholar Thomas Gibson, who had come to Arato investigate this copy of the Jayalangkara. His research had nothing to do with things Bajo. (Fieldnotes, Ara, 31 October 1999.) There is also an Indonesian scholar named Daeng Mangemba, a sha�witted, but now blind and aged man, whom I met athis house in Makassarduring fieldwork. He is so old that when I mentioned my visit with him to a Dutch scholar, the latter exclaimed in disbelief. I thought Daeng Mangemba was dead!

179 One of the first thingsJohari mentioned, afterwe did a little genealogy of his

immediate family - his parents, wife and children - was his connection to someone I

knew in distant Tiworo: the current village head ofPulo Balu. Johari pointed out that he

and this village head were second cousins: "My fa ther has lolo descent. His mother has 206 lolo descent. Only, (his status) has fallen a bit because his father is not lolo." I had met

this village head nine years earlier when he was still an official with the Forestry

Department. He had recently been married to Nurhawana, the woman who first taught me

to live in a Sarnahouse, a woman who is fictive kin to me, an "older sister," with high

status Sarnadescent on both sides of her family. This village head's fa ther had Konjo

antecedents in South Sulawesi (as did Johari's non-Sama wife), but he was still

considered an excellent match for Nur - the government position and his lolo descent

were both certainly factors.

Johari's slight, his put-down regarding this village head's status, became

especially interesting in light of the non-Sama aspects of his own lineage. He did not

emphasize these in our discussions, but as I asked about it directly, I fo und out, first, that

his own mother was neither lolo nor Sarna; rather she was of Goa lineage from Jeneponto

in South Sulawesi. And apparently his father's mother also was not Sarna, something I figuredout later in conversations with relatives who either had the same father as he did but different mothers, or the same grandfather but different grandmothers. This informationabout non-Sama maternal lines turnsout to be relevant to the path taken by this lontaraq, helping to elucidate why it took the route it did, as we shall see below.

206 "Mamanya dia keturunan lolo. Bapak Johari ketunman lolo. Hanya, jatuh sedikit, karena bapaknya bukan /olo." Fieldnotes, Johari, Ara, 26 October 1999.

180 Given the initial confusion in our conversation, I was eager to engage Johari on some "simple facts." I had heard that Saparing, his uncle Makka's child, had the lontaraq in Labuanbajo; therefore I sought confirmation or clarification of who borrowed it and who held it. Johari mentioned the lontaraq had been taken to Manggarai:

Jen: Where is Manggarai? Joh: Sumbawa. 7 Jen: Labuanbajo?20 Joh: Yes. Jen: Who borrowed it? Joh: Makkatutu. Jen: It was not Sapri or Saparing? Joh: That is his child. Makkatutu was his father.

This seemed perfectly straightforward. But then Johari went on:

Joh: All of it is there(in the lontaraq). (The genealogy of) Luwuq, up to Gowa, up to Hamenkubuwono. Right? -you know, his origins are also Bugis, his ancestors. He went offto make his way there { merantau}, later it became a kingdom. Like down in Buton. The Buton kingdom is from Bone. But (even) since the old days the court has never been entered by the Dutch. As for the Bugis, they have (had the Dutch come in), to the point 8 where their kingdom fe ll apart and was not united again. 20

The fo llowing day when we met again, while looking over my shoulder at the notes I had taken, Johari suddenly said:

Joh: Take out that Hamengkubowono part. Jen: Yes, I was just wondering how that could be possible. Joh: Take it out because that was already separate.

Seeing his statement, objectified as it were, on paper, he seems to have realized that ascribing the origins of a Javanese court to a Bugis man was, perhaps, going a bit too fa r.

It was not that Johari had trouble sorting truth from fiction, he just seemed to prefer to

207 "Manggarai" commonly refers to Flores, which is also the location of Labuanbajo (not Sumbawa); but "Manggarai" is also sometimes used to refer less to a specific island than to that region of the archipelago. 208 Fieldnotes, Johari, Ara,26 October 1999.

181 play with how far he could push things. Clearly, though, there was a "too fa r" that he could recognize.

The conversation on that first daycontinu ed:

Jen: Precisely who borrowedit? Joh: Andi Makkatutu. Jen: Is he still alive? Joh: He has alreadydied, leaving his child, Saparing. Jen: So Saparing has it? Joh: The thing remainsthere with him now. {Di situ tinggal barangnya sekarang.} That thing of my father's was borrowed. {ltu mi ayahsaya dipinjam.} He was insulted in Labuanbajo back then {the uncle}. So he borrowed the lontaraq and brought it to Labuanbajo. He showed it there in order for his lineage to be believed. There are two kinds of /olo; lolo is the tenn for raja. Afterhe went there, it wasn't acknowledged {that he was lolo} because there were no signs of the/hiskingdom. That's why he came here, to borrowthe lontaraq. Afterhe arrived there (again) only then was he believed. Jen: This is Makka? Job: Makka. Because lots of people profess {mengakui dirinya} to being a descendant of sultans. But there is no proof. So he came home to Ara here, he borrowed that /ontaraq, and brought it back to Labuanbajo as a sign of proof that his descent was lolo, (or) sultan.

As with those who inherit a lontaraq, for those who borrowone, a lontaraq constitutes evidence of one's highstatus descent. The presumptionat work is that one could only get such a /ontaraq either through inheritanceor by borrowing it from a relative. In one sense, then, /ontaraq "belong" to lineages, and this pattern of inheritance and lending within a lineage may be seen as the sort of keeping-while-giving discussed by Annette Weiner (1992). However, even though such objects may be seen as "owned" by a lineage this does not keep individuals throughwhose hands a manuscript haspassed fromref erring to one as "my /ontaraq" or "the lontaraq I own," as Joharidoes below.

Earlier in the chapterwe saw that for 19th century owners of Malay manuscripts, social proprieties made it hard to press for their return, so thatthey, too, "owned"

182 lontaraq that others kept as a result of"borrowing." Inthe case of this lontaraq, rather than a reluctance to press for its return, Johari focuses attention on another social propriety, the difficultyof turningdown the request to borrow it. Nonetheless, it did also seem as though Johari were interested in the possibility of getting the lontaraq back:

"Sometime around next month," he said, "I'm going to Labuanbajo, that's the plan" ­ presumably to do so. Yet the remarkhad an unconvincing air to it, as though this was something he wished to do but probably would not. The prospects, in my view, were not helped by a domestic picture in which his wife made a living as an itinerant trader, while he clearly did not get around as much, perhaps, as he used to. Directly fo llowing this statement about planning to go to Labuanbf.\io, Johari described the scene in which his uncle borrowed the lontaraq. His brother, Johang, he mentioned "was angry because I lent it out. He {their uncle} cried when I lent it to him. At first I didn'twant to, but he

209 cried, tears fe ll. I viewed myself as having sinned, so I gave it to him." Johari portrays himself as repenting at the thought of witholding the lontaraq from his uncle, and he dispenses kindness in the end. It is an imagethat puts him across as having had the upper hand in relation to his uncle. Yet, given the dubious credibility of some of his other statements, it is hard just to take his word on the conditions and context in which the lontaraq was "borrowed." To his credit, though, there is at least some consistency in the rationale he gave for why his uncle borrowed it - that he was insulted (dihina) in

Labuanbajo - for Liebner also notes that he lent it to his uncle fo r this same reason

(Liebner 1998: 119).

Curious about what Johari knew of its contents, I asked whether he could read lontaraq, and he said he could because it was in Bugis writing. Wondering if, like Haji

209 Fieldnotes, Johari, Ara, 26 October 1999.

183 ---- - "------

Mahmud with LB Lemobajo, he had heard stories about the past before reading them, I

asked if his mother told him stories about historywhen he was small, and his reply was

yes. Later, however, he offered a recognizable but somewhat garbled rendition of the

kelong discussed in the last chapter, and as a result, I asked if his mother had sung them.

No, as it happened, his father had done so, "because my mother is not lolo Bajo."210

If, however, his father sang about the Sarnapast, rather than read from the

lontaraq as with Haji Mahmud's father-in-law, did, I wondered, the contents of this

211 lontaraq itself actually contain any narrative?

Jen: Is that lontaraq only a genealogy, or is it also stories of history? Joh: I don't really remember that well. { Saya tidak begitu hafal. } Jen: Was it rolled or was it a book? Joh: A book. but it was very thick. Just onepage. But it was rolled. {sic.}

Johari described and drew what were identifiably symbols one might use in a

genealogy, with circles fo r each name andwhat he said was an "umbrella" above the

212 names of each ofthose who had ruled. He explained that there were two kinds of

lontaraq: one was called a "stambul" {sic.} the contents of which were a book of history,

whereas a "long lontaraq" dealt with descent. "Thestam bul also has descent, but there

21° Fieldnotes, Johari, Ara, 27 October 1999. This was one of the fe w instances in which people referred to having heard the kelong sung. In addition to Johari's saying that his father had sung them, I came across three other references to song, specifically in the context of the kelong as one among a group of stanzas, and not to be confused with the nearly-lost group of Sarna songs known as iko-iko. These other references included a good friend from Bontu-Bontu, Nuhba, a.k.a. Ceq, now married and living �n Pulo Tasippi (both in Tiworo ), who mentioned that her grandmother used to sing such materials. (My own memory of Ceq's lovely singing brings to mind Arlo Nimmo's (1994) Songs of Sa/anda.) One elderly man in Kambuno recalled small gatherings in which the ke/ong was sung as one ofmultile stanzas. Finally, an elderly Bugis woman, who spent a good deal of time when she was young at the court ofPalopo, had also heard songs there that included bits about the Sarna past. This woman, Puah Lebbi, whom I met at a Bugis wedding in Malili, was one of the very few Bugis people I met who knew that "lo/o'' was/is a Sarna term. The way she used it, however, "lo/oku" - specificallyin reference to someone Sarna - meant something like "tanteku," "my aunt," an indicator at least that there was some historical memoryof affinal (or fictive kin) ties between Bugis elite families and Sarna people. 1 21 It is certainlyconceivable that the /ontaraq contents could broadly match those of recitation, chanting, or song, which might be carried out without ever actually having read a particular story in manuscript, as with Sears (1996). Yet part of what I wanted to know was whether or not this lontaraq contained passages of extended narrative like LB Lemobajo. 212 What he drew looked like an upward-pointing symbol fo r "male."

184 3 are no drawings, it is explanations."21 There are two confusions at work here: first he

mistakes the term for a colonial era theater fo rm (stambul)with stamboom, the Dutch

word fo r genealogy or lineage tree; then he describes this "stambul" as having no

drawings - in other words, as not a genealogy but rather a text with explanations, that is,

in written narrative.

If the text was only a genealogy, as others later confirmed, then whatever stories

his father or mother passed to him, they were not read fr om this text. Furthermore, if this

lontaraq was only a genealogy and did not have any other materials in it such as narrative

or poetry, then the stories that Johari told Liebner, wherever they came fr om, did not 14 come from this lontaraq.2 As much as Johari may have wanted Liebner to believe that

the stories he told were "an oral version of the Lontaraq of Ara,n this they most certainly

were not.

Indeed, not only was there no narrative element to the "lontaraq of Ara," it also

turned out that this lontaraq was only "of Ara" quite briefly, fo r, as I was quite surprised

to hear, Johari mentioned that they had only hadthe lontaraq a mere five years before his uncle borrowed it and brought it to Labuanbajo. Curious about the fa ct that his father had

had the lontaraq but that Johari portrayed himself as the lender, I inquired whether his father was still alive at the time it was borrowed. As it happened, he was not. This detail then thoroughly threwthe pict ure of Johari as benevolent lender of the lontaraq into a different light, for it would probably have been much easier fo r Makka to ask fo r the

213 Fieldnotes, Johari, Ara, 27 October 1999. 214 Liebner'ssearch took him from Kanalo and Kambuno to Jampea, from where he was sent "back to Ara, where the offspring of the original owner now lives. However, arrivingin Ara, I was told that the /ontara' had been recently taken to Labuan Bajo in Floresto prove the noble blood of a member of the fa mily who fe lt offended by the local Bajo. However, Bapak Johari, son of a famous Bajo trader by the name of Puang Mappe who owned the lontara•, volunteered to tell me what he knew from reading the manuscript" (Liebner 1998: 119).

185 lontaraq when facing a young nephew than it would have been to ask fo r it from his older

brother.

As the conversation during this second day moved on to other details, Johari's

remark about having only had the lontaraq fo r five years receded fr om my thoughts. I had not yet caught up, as it were, to the implication that it either had not existed, or it had

been somewhere else, beforehand. It thus startled me when Johari drew a connection between this /ontaraq and Pulo Balu, where, he said, it had a "friend" or "companion"

(ternan):

Job: In Pulo Balu there is the friend of that lontaraq I have; it is no different. Jen: Why (mention) Pulo Balu? Job: There's a whatsit, its friend, butI do not know who possesses it there. It is exactly the same as my /ontaraq {Sama persis de ngan saya punya lontaraq}. Jen: Acopy {sa/inan}? Job: Yes, a copy. Jen: A copy of what, made at the same time as the one your fa ther had? which was copied from bark? Job: The same, because it was my father who copied that. So it's in Pulo Balu. Jen: How many copies were made of it? Job: (Just) thatone sheet. {Satu /embar itu. } One person holds it in Pulo Balu. {Satu orang pegang itu di Pu/o Balu.} Jen: And that one is also one sheet? Job: Also one sheet. There is no difference from my lontaraq. So if you go to Pulo Balu, ask there. Jen: Who was it that copj�d it? Job: I don't remember because it was so long ago. But it's in Pulo Balu. Jen: And how do you know it's in Pulo Balu? Job: Yes, well, I know because it so happens I was there when it was copied (and) brought by a person in our fa mily in Pulo Balu. Jen: How old wereyou then? Job: Ifl am not mistaken, fifteen or a little older.

I had no idea, up until this point, that hearsay about this /ontaraq might lead me back to Pulo Balu. But I was glad for an excuse to return there, the Sarna village I knew best, and I would stop in Kambuno again on my way.

186 On this return trip to Kambuno, I came across hearsay about what I thought at

first was the same lontaraq, a genealogy that had been "taken" by Mappe's fa ther (thus

Johari's grandfather). Mappe's father was Andi Malaniun:g Petta Rani, despite the Bugis

titles, widely acknowledged as a Sarna man. In Kambuno I spoke with two great­

grandaughters of his, Atibulaeng and Hatimung, by his first wife. Malaniung had fo ur

wives, and Opu Jannimeng, a Sarna woman of lolo descent from Luwuq, was the first.

Mappe and Makka were the children of his fo urth wife, Asyok, a Bugis woman from

Liang-liang in the Pulo Sembilan group. Talking with Atibulaeng and Hatimung in

Kambuno, I learned that their grandmother, Lolo lnja, (the daughter ofMalaniung and his

first wife, Opu Jannimeng), had had a lontaraq. Thinking that this lontaraq had then

devolved to Lolo lnja's daughter - the informants' mother- I referred to it as Puah Janni's

or PanJanni's lontaraq, and asked whether it was the same as the one in Sumbawa, the

one Johang or Johari had had. Atibulaeng corrected me saying that it was not Johang's; it

was Lolo lnja's, and PanJanni had never had it. Asyok, however, had held it. Malaniung,

apparently, had taken Lolo Inja's lontaraq. The explanation offered fo r why he had done

so was that he had other wives; Asyok's name (the fourth wife) was immediately

mentioned. When I askedagain why it was taken, the reason given was that she was

Bugis from Liang-liang. It appears, in other words, that Malaniung had taken a lontaraq,

a genealogy held by the daughter of his first wife, a Sarna woman, and had given it to his

215 fourth wife, a Bugis woman.

215 Atibulaeng, Pulau Kambuno, 8 November 1999 (tape #23), and Fieldnotes, 8 November, 1999.

187 He might well have done thisto "prove" his lolo descent to his fo urth wife, as it is quite possible that Malaniung's own antecedents were also recorded in the genealogy.216

In addition, giving it to her would provide her not only with a precious heirloom, a gift, but withsomething that would attest to the high-status descent her ownchildren would have through his line.

I had thoughtthat this /ontaraq was the same one I had been hearing about from

Johang in Kanalo and his brother Johari in Ara. The lontaraq that had been taken by their grandfather from the child of his first wife and given to their grandmother, the Bugis woman Asyok, would probably, I figured, have been inherited by their father, Asyok's child, Mappe. However, I still did not know what to make of Johari's mentioning (were he to be believed) that the lontaraq to which he referred had only been with them for five years before his uncle Makka borrowed it. And I still wondered, moreover, what to make of the connection Johari raised with Pulo Balu. Did someone there have a lontaraq related to the genealogy his uncle borrowed? And had his father Mappe really copied it there himself? It that were so, it would be very unique and interesting, fo r as far as I had seen there were certainly Sarna people who could read Bugis, and who before the war used it for writing letters. But I had not yet seen any evidence about the circumstances in which heirloom Iontaraq might have been recopied.

When I finallygot back to Pulo Balu in Tiworo, I was fortunately able to make the link that Johari indicated, only, as one might expect, the story I got in Pulo Balu did

216 Andi Malaniung's father was reportedly from the Salabangka islands, far up the east coast of Southeast Sulawesi, where Burghoom (see chapter 4) heard the story of Lolo Papu. His mother, Lolo Sarine, was from Tinobu, in Lasolo Bay, not far from Lemobajo, also on Sulawesi's east coast. There appear to be some traceable genealogical connections between Sarna in eastern Sulawesi, the Luwuq region of the Gulf of Bone, and islands inthe Flores Sea (andeverything in between), but they generallyreach back not more than five generations, thepoint at which it gets very difficultto tack names onto genealogical memory among most Sarnapeople.

188 not quite jive with how Johari said things went. An elderly man named Moto in Pulo

Balu explained that he remembered Mappe's visit there. Mappe had been to Pulo Balu on

a fishing trip (gaiq), but he had also asked about fa mily, fo r "he knew there were Sarna

relatives of his grandfather here, since the mother ofTiqno was Sama.11 Tiqno is one of

217 Mappe's daughters by his first wife, a Sarna woman named Fatimang, so this

218 confirmed for me that we were talking about the same person named Mappe. Yet

Moto's phrasing was also interesting fo r it implied that Mappe's first wife Fatimang knew

enough about Sarna lineages in the region to tell her husband Mappe that he, too had

relatives in Tiworo. These would have been his paternal relatives, as Asyok, you may

recall, was his Bugis mother. Moto himself could not remember the names of Mappe's

ownparents, neither Asyok, nor Andi Malaniung, who was fairly well-known to Sarna

people in the western Gulfof Bone. Moto did, nonetheless, seem to be aware that Mappe,

219 and not just his first wife, had Sarna ancestors.

Map¢, however, did not come to Pulo Balujust to look for fish and family, or if

he did, he certainly came away with more than simply a deeper knowledge of his

relatedness to Sarnapeople in Tiworo. For according to Moto, Mappe 11borrowed" a

lontaraq fromhis first cousin, Kalaba. There was no mentionof him making a copy as

Johari had described. Mappe took the /ontaraq with him.

217 Fatimah or Fatimang, Mappe's first wife, would probably have known of family in Tiworo through Lolo Ekoq. Lolo Ekoq wasMoto's paternalgrandf ather (through Lolo Raitung), and was also the maternal grandfather(through Lolo Ambiq) ofKalaba (see below); these people were all born and all lived in Pulo Balu, except for Lolo Ekoq who came from the island Kadjuara near Jampea, an area more commonly frequented by Sarnaofthe western Gulf of Bone. 218 Haj i BuraCra, who lived in Pulo Balu until he was captured and pressed into service fo r Dl-Til in 1954 (probably), also recalledthat "Andi Mappe" had visitedPulo Maginti and Pulo Balu in the Tiworo Straits. Fieldnotes, Haji Buraera, Ranteangin, North Kolaka, 6 March 2000. 219 Like Andi Malaniung, who was a well-known /o/o-descended Sarna trader in the western Gulf of Bone, in Tiworo andthe regions surrounding it there was a verysimi lar sort offigure throughwhom many Sarna people proudly tracedtheir genealogies: Anakhoda Manting. His boat wasthe Bintong Sedong,

189 Moto said that the lontaraq wasquite broad. Comparing it with the notebook I

used, he said it was about twice as thic� roughly thtee centimeters, and he described

large folio pages. It was defmitely a silsilah, a genealogy, and in reply to my questions he

said it was not a book filledwith lines of writing, in other words, it was not narrative.

There hadbeen a book like that, written in Bugis, he said. But it was burned in housea in

Bone-bone, the house of his elder brother andsister-in-law, which succumbed to flames

along with about two hundred other houses duringthe time of the gangs.220 ltWhat was

borrowed by Mappe," he added, "during the Japanese period was only a genealogy.''221

What this means is that this lontaraq had been borrowed twice, and in a relatively

short time: firstit was borrowedby Mappe fromKalaba and taken from Pulo Balu, in the

Tiworo Straits, to Pulo Kanalo, across the Gulf of Bone. Then it was borrowed by

Mappe's brother Makka and taken fromAra, south across the Flores Sea, almost certainly

to Labuanbajo.

It may have been taken fromPulo Balu at thevery end of the Japanese period, as

Moto indicated, although there is some reason to question this ascription of the timing,

for a number of things point to it being moved fromPulo Balu a bit later. During a final

visit to Lo Kader in Tampo, for instance, I asked about the fo ur sister manuscripts, the

four that his nephew Kamaruddin once told me were rumoredto exist, one of which was

certainly LB Lemobajo. Inaddition to this manuscript in Lemobajo, one lontaraq, said Lo

Kader, was supposed to be in Kendariand another had been in Bontu-bontu,just a short .

220 In Tiworo, Bone-bone is the Sama name for the location, more or less, of the contemporary village Wanseriwu. This village on the northwest cost ofMuna island is just landward ofthe mangrove swamps and borders a small river. The fo rmer village head ofPulo Balu, Marhalim, lives there now. Moto's elder sister and brother-in-law, respectively,were Lo Bedda and Burahima 221 Fieldnotes, Lolo Moto, Pulo Balu, 6 April 2000. Mota's father Lolo Raitung was siblingswith Kalaba's mother Lolo Ambiq.

190 ride offshore from Tampo. This latter was probably the one with which Lo Kader was

most familiar, the one he had heard stories from, and upon which he based a lengthy and

detailed re-telling for me some years earlier. The fo urth lontaraq, Lo Kader said, was in

Pulo Balu. It had been held by Puah Habeq, also known as Kalabeq, or in the more open-

voweled Sarna pronunciation, Kalaba. This /ontaraq, according to Lo Kader, had been

222 "taken by the gangs" {diambil sama gerombolan}.

Was Mappe, then, seen as a Darul Islam fighter who coerced the /ontaraq fromits

rigthful owners? Lo Kader, at least, did not mention Mappe, and either he did not know

or did not acknowledge that the person who took Kalaba's lontaraq might have had a

legitimate claim to borrow it. In Kanalo, both Madeq Ali and Johang had mentioned that

the /ontaraq was brought to Labuanbajo in the "time of the gangs." If, as Johari

mentioned, it really was only in the possession of Mappe and his sons fo r five years

before being taken to Labuanbajo from Ara, then it seems quite unlikely that it was taken

from Kalaba in the Japanese period. It could have been taken shortly afterwards, say

around 1946 or, even later in the 1940's, since the DI-Til rebellion began in 1951, but

22 · lasted throughout the decade. 3 In any case, Moto, fo r his part, did not present a picture

in which his cousin Kalaba's lontaraq was taken by DI-Til rebels, and he himself had

been in Pulo Balu when the lontaraq was "borrowed" by Mappe.

At some point, though, the lontaraq was moved from Kanalo to Ara, fo r that is where Makkaborrowed it from Johari. Johari lived in Araduring "the time of the gangs" and he mentioned that Ara, during that time, was part of the "depattoq" region. Without wanting to dwell on the matter he advised that I ask ldrus about this term. ldrus was a

222 Fieldnotes, Lo Kader, Tampo, 16 April 2000. 223 See chapter six where I discuss materials on this rebellion and Tiworo.

191 local notable who had fought on the side ofDI-TII, and I did talk with him, but not to ask

him to clarify "daerah depattoq," a region (daerah) I understood to be under the

"defacto" control of the rebels. As happened in Tiworo during the rebellion, people in the

islands offSin jai on South Sulawesi's coast were somewhat vulnerable to visits by both

rebel and offical government fighters. Many Sarnapeople from the Sembilan islands fled south from this region, far enough south to avoid being pressedinto service or into providing support to either the rebels or the official government's army. Since DI-Til

"had people" in a number of the islands in the Flores Sea, certainly in Jarnpeawhich seems to have been a base of support, these islands would not have been far enough;

Flores and Sumbawa were safer. The fact that Johari went to or remained in Ara-and for a time the lontaraq did too -partof the depattoq region controlled by the rebels, tempts one toward the possibilitythat his father may indeed have been "with" DI-Til, or that at least there is reason to understand why he could have been perceived this way by some.

Also quite interesting is the factthat although Johari said they only had the lontaraq for fiveyears before his uncle borrowed it, never once did he mention that it might have been taken south to Labuanbajo in order to keep it safe in such a time of turmoil. This was not the reasonfo r it's being borrowed a second time. And the reason

Johari offered, that his uncle had fe lt insulted and needed proofof his descent, was, I

224 think, only part of the story. His uncle would not have needed to borrow the /ontaraq to prove his descent to other Sarnawho had fled from South Sulawesi, fo r, like numerous people still living in the Sembilan islands now, they would already have known about where he "came from" genealogically. Nor is it likely that he would have needed it to

224 Whereas he told Leibner that the/ontaraq was borrowed to prove a familymember's descent to the local Sarnaby whom hefelt off ended (Liebner 1998: 1 19), in talking to me, althoughhe also said that Makka had fe lt humiliated (dihina), he did not specifY other Sarna people as the source or the cause.

192 "prove" his descent to other Sarna people already living in "Manggarai," for some of those people would almost certainly already have had lineage connections with other

Sarna people from Sulawesi. They would likely have been able, even if in a piecemeal fa shion, to put together enough information about the region's interconnected elite Sarna genealogies to substantiate almost anyone's claims to having lolo antecedents. It is common fo r Sarna people from different regions who meet fo r the first time to engage in precisely this sort of exercise to determine theirrelatedne ss, albeit sometimes in imprecise degrees. It is, however, possible that his status claims were called into question as a result of their knowing his motherwas neither lolo nor Sarna. Yet, this picture lacks a setting or context for any sort of "insult" or "humiliation" in which having to "prove" his descent would matter. ·The most likely context is that Johari's uncle Makka needed substantive "proof' of his elite paternal descent in order to convince a prospective non­

Sama bride and her fam ily of the legitimacy of his claims to being high-status.

While we do not know fo r certain what the precise context was for his need to borrow the lontaraq, since even the "local" Sarna there would have been able to verify who his fa ther was with other Sarnathey knew from the westernGulf of Bone, it is more likely that he needed it to prove his descent to non-Sama people in Labuanbajo. While this is the likely reasonMakka borroweda lontaraq from his nephew, it is indeed the reason why his father Andi Malaniung had appropriated a lontaraq from a daughter of his firstmarr iage, that is, in order to prove himself to a subsequent non-Sarna wife.

A similar dynamic likewise appears to have played a role in Mappe's "bouowing" ofKalaba's lontaraq. AlthoughJohari said he went with his father when he borrowed the lontaraq in Pulo Balu, it is impossible that he would have been in his teens (as he said),

193 and as his father Mappe went to Pulo Balu in the late 1940's or very early 1950's, Johari may not even have been born yet. When Mappe made his trip there, he probably already had three children by his first wife, the Sarna woman Fatimah (or Fatimang), had been married to a second wife with whom he had no children, and was probably either courting or had recently married his third wife, the mother of Johang and Johari, Karaeng Ngai

Daeng Puji. Since she was non-Sarna yet had some elite Makassar descent herself, the lontaraq borrowed by Mappe in Pulo Balu might have enabled Mappe to fe el at least her status equal, and it would have convinced her that by marrying him she was not lowering her own status. She would also probably have been interested in such proof of Mappe's elite Sarna (paternal) descent not only fo r her own social position but also for the sake of her children's in an extraordinarily status-conscious multi-ethnic society.

People thus borrowed lontaraq to back-up their claims to high-status Sarna descent and such borrowed manuscripts continued to be treated as heirloom objects with access to borrowing them restricted to lineage members. They were not lent out as

"recreational" literature but rather fo r particular reasons still very much embedded in the social relationships pertinent to them. For those who had obtained manuscripts through borrowing rather than inheritance, there appeared to be a special needto substantiate their status claims towardnon-Sarna people, and, in particular, to new wives. The manuscripts were thus important not only to Sarna people, but also played a role in substaniating

Sarna status toward non-Sama others. "Loaned" manuscripts took the particular routes they did, then, not simply to buttress status claims vis a vis other Sarna people, but as part of inter-group practices of recognizing these claims. In other words, lontaraq did not just

194 play an important role in the reproduction of stratificationamong Sarnacommunities, but

in wider social fields of which Sarnapeople in the region were a part.

Authority: textual.genealogi cal, political

How did lontaraq come to be treated this way? That is, how did lontaraq get

disseminated in Sarnacommunities and how did they come to have such significance

both fo r Sarnapeople, as well as between them and people of other groups?

While prior to the nineteenth century manuscripts were not objects of commerct:;!

but were instead inherited or lent out, this changed, perhaps when Raffles began to collect

in earnestfrom his base in Malacca in 1908 (Proudfoot and Hooker 1996: 78). Although there was some concern in the nineteenth centurythat the considerabletraffic in manuscripts meant the loss of them from Insular Southeast Asia, there is little doubt that

European demand stimulated manuscript production, for many of the manuscripts that were collected were copied specificallyfo r that purpose (Tol 1996: 219; Proudfoot and

Hooker 1996: 77-78). The stimulation of manuscript production by European collection efforts does not, however, really help to explain the dissemination and persistence of lontaraq manuscripts in private hands outside of South Sulawesi's royal centers and beyond the peninsula's shores. This is what I wantto tum tonow.

Not long ago, William Cummings argued that the coming of Islam to Makassar was largely a matter of texts, and that how thesetexts were treated depended greatly on attitudes and practices already at play in relation to Makassar language lontaraq. As mentioned above, these manuscripts were closely guarded andwere considered to be

195 spiritwllly potent objects that recordedand testified to one's status and links to legendary ancestors (Cummings 2001a: 560, 562, 564). Drawing on the work of Timothy Mitchell

( 1991 : 131) , Cummings pointed out the close relation between political authority and the authorship of texts. And drawing on Brinkley Messick's ( 1993) work, he argued that the empire created by Gowa, which domin�ted Makassar until its defeat by the Dutch in

1669, "may well represent ... a 'textual polity'."

The idea of using this "textual polity" notion is appealing, for it has the potential to explain the relationship between political and textual authority, and to have some application away from the centers where these oftenappear to concentrate. Brinkley

Messick's notion of a "textual polity" entails, "both a conception of an authoritative text, involving structures of authorship, a method of instructional transmission, institutions of interpretation, and modes of documentary inscription, and a pattern of textual authority, which figures in state legitimacy, the communication of cultural capital, relations of social hierarchy, and the control of productive resources" (Messick 1993: 6 in Cummings

2001: 579).

Partof the problem with Cummings' attempt to use the notion of a "textual polity" to describe the fo rce oflslamictexts in early modernMakassar, is that while he acknowledges the importance of preceding Makassar-language texts, he seems to almost disregard the ongoing importance ofthe production,reproduction and dissemination of texts that arenot particularlyIslamic. For such texts thereis still extremely little known about specific methods of instructionaltransmi ssion and institutions of interpretation, and it only becomes intermittentlypossible to talk about structures of authorship beginning later in the nineteenthcentury, whenaut horship was sometimes made explicit by scribes

196 working with and fo r colonial Europeans.225 Similarly, as mentioned above, in the Bugis

context we know precious little about the settings in which manuscripts were created and

recopied, and although we may be able to tell something about such settings fr om the

content of manuscripts, the settings themselves are not described anywhere (Macknight ·

and Caldwell 2001: 145).

While Cummings does acknowledge the importance of particular texts to

individuals and communities outside ofMakassar's court circles (something he explores

more in 2001 b), it is difficult to see how, as he says, "The presence of sacred, potent

Arabic words contained in Islamictexts offered Makassarese material with which to

represent and transform social and political relations by controlling and manipulating

texts" (Cummings 2001: 579). It sounds feasible, but he does not really show us how this worked. Without such an explanation, it is consequently difficult to get one's head around the "polity" part of his use of Messick's notion of "textual polity."

My interests, in contrast, are with explaining a dissemination of lontaraq, mostly in Bugis, among Sarnapeople - who never seem to have dominated a court center.

The contemporarytran smission and circulation of lontaraq among Sarna people takes place along genealogical networks structured by lineal connections to high-status forebears. These networks circumscribe both who may be a holder or possessor of manuscripts and who is anappro priate subject of knowledge about the Sarnapast. To make historical sense of this dissemination of lontaraq away from court centers and beyond the peninsula's shores, one must consider this structure of manuscript circulation and knowledge production in light of two developments, in the seventeenth and the

22 5 A phenomenon that took placenot only with Bugis manuscripts (Tol 1990, 2000; Mac!c.nightand Caldwell 200 l: 145), but with those from other partsof the archipelago as well (inter alia: To I 2001; van der Putten 1995, 2001; Florida 1995).

197 nineteenth centuries, respectively, eachof which altered the dynamics between genealogical and political authority.

In the seventeenth century, coinciding more or less with the allied Bugis and

Dutch defeat ofMak.assar, a combination of factors enabled the ruler of Bone to resolved the struggles over power-sharing between the king and his council. As in other parts of

South Sulawesi, an ideology of"white blood" encouraged the fa milies of rulers to maintain their exclusive "purity," and in many kingdoms there were interdictions on marriage between the families of the rulers and those of the councils. However, by fusing the fa milies of king and council through intermarriage, this rulercreated instead one big nobilityin which the rankingof power paralleled a blood hierarchy (Andaya 1981;

Sutherland 1980: 237-238).

Council families who married "up" had children who inherited a higher social status, while the rulers, who after all were still preeminent, sat at the top of an expanding kin network. Not only would this move of fusing the fa milies of king and council have enabled lower nobles to many up the hierarchy, but, I argue, it would also have provided a means (if not "incentive") for members of other descent groups to many "in," thereby promoting Bone's political expansion. Thisinnova tion thus goes at least part of the way to explaining why we see a shift from local integration, suggested by a preponderance of marriages between rulers andlocal A rung in the pre-Islamic sections of Bugis royal genealogies (15th and 16th centuries), to a much greater occurrence marriagesof between kingdoms in the post-Islamic sections of the same genealogies, "particularly fo llowing

198 226 the tumultuous events ofthe seventeenth century" (Caldwell 1995: 397-8 and note 12).

This expansion of aspiring nobility would, in turn, have dispelled minor royalty away

from court centers, and augmented Bugis - and especially Bone's - political authority in

peripheral regions (also see Bulbeck 1996).

In both Makassar and Bugis court settings at this time, it was already the case that

texts were an important part of substantiating elite lineages. Textual authority, that is, was

already linked to political and genealogical authority. With the political innovation just

described - one that furthered not simply a "marriage politics" of linking kingdoms, but

also a kind of "genealogical method" of political expansion - such tex�s would have

attested to the high status descent of those Bugis who married people of other ethnic or

227 descent groups. With the entextualization of genealogies, especially, but with any

genre of text that indexed high status descent, lineage ideologies would no longer need to

be borne sitpply by a particular subject, but could be conveyed as well by textual objects

transported into contexts beyond the immediacy of social spaces where one's lineage

antecedents were well-known by others. The point here is that this "genealogical method"

of political expansion would likely have been backed by a certain degree of textual

authority, and that genealogies or other sorts of texts attesting to high status descent, or

copies of them, would have become heirloom objects inherited by the progeny of such

unions between different descent groups.

This theorized dynamic of the expansion of political authority through

genealogical ties that extend over time and social space, supported by /ontaraq that index

226 While the particularroyal genealogies with which Caldwell makes this point are from Soppeng, this nonetheless indicates greater intermarriage between kingdoms of the peninsula generally,of which Bone was but one, yet the most importantone afterthe 1670's. 227 Admittedly,though, we do not have descriptions of them being used in precisely this way.

199 high-status descent, is very different from, fo r instance, what Cummings presents in his

reconsideration of the imbrication of oralityand literacy (Cummings 2003). In that

analysis, Makassar language lontaraq among Makassar language speech communities fit

into a picture of relations between a fixed center (Gowa) and marginal or subordinate

Makassarese domains who contest Oowa's authority, in part through the use of texts as

kalompoang objects as well as through narratives that contest the provenance of 228 important kalompoang. Meaning "greatness," kalompoang, "refers to a class of sacred

objects or regalia possessed by many Makassarese communities and nobles." These

inherited heirloom objects "incarnated the past in the present and their possession

conferred social status and political legitimacy" (Cummings 2003: 535), like the textual objects I examine here.

In a very rare glimpse of commentaryabout what happened to some Makassarese manuscripts, Cummings finds the fo llowing remarks at the end of the last page of a manuscript recounting the history of Baku, a Makassarese locality:

It is greatlyto be regretted that the lontaraq telling about this was borrowed by Sombaya {the rulerof Makassar} at the time of the installation of Arung Pao {the ruler ofBak u}. He asked to just borrow it but has not yet returned it until this time. It was borrowed by an old woman named I Maniya. She asked to borrow it in order to copy it. There were (other lontaraq) taken by the Dutch; there were others that were lost; there were others that were burned by Sombaya of Gowa.229

Although these events - and in particular this borrowing - are not precisely dateable,

h Cummings says they likely took place in the late 19th or early 201 century (Cummings

228'Compare Hoskins (1993: 82) who discusses a genre of storytelling about the past among Sumba's Kod i in which knowledge of an object's origins can carry power overthat object. 9 22 Manuscript N 16, p. IS in William Cummings' private collection, most of which are copies of privately owned manuscripts borrowed (probably from relatives) by his Makassarese language tutor during fieldwork: "his family connections and social ties were critical in gaining access to these texts" (Cummings 2003: 527, note 5; also see Cummings 2002: 52-:3).

200 2003: 53 7, note 5). As with Malay manuscripts in the 19th century (discussed above), it seems that there was great reluctance to press for the return of manuscripts, yet clearly the owner of this one would have liked to have it back. And as with the paths of lontaraq

I examine above, in order to borrow a manuscript, a mere kin connection is not enough.

One needs a good reason, and here, that reason is the installation of Baku's ruler, Arung

Pao. Presumably he was being installed by Gowa, which borrowed the lontaraq to verify his status claims and thus his eligibility to office.

Cummings explains in a fo otnote that:

The exchange of kalompoang was not unknown in Mak�ssar and was one mechanism used to strengthen social ties among communities and to enhance the kalompoang's reputation, and, hence, the status of the community in which it was kept beyond the local community. In this context a noble woman from the Gowa court borrowedthe lontaraq from Baku described here. 230

Unfortunately, Cummings provides no other examples to illustrate how

Makassarese manuscripts areborrowed, inherited, or exchanged. Yet what is so striking about this footnote is that, in explaining "borrowing," it draws attention to how this example disagrees with what is argued in the text. Cummings uses the final remarks of the mansucript quoted above to directly illustrate the statement that:

Gowa asserted its centrality within Makassar by seizing the sacred kalompoang - including written texts - of other Makassarese communities and, by possessing these manuscripts and regalia, dominating their past and present. Controlling the past and gathering its significance to itself through such acts was straightforward; violent andoff en effective. 23 1

Yet this specific instance describing how a lontaraq about Baku's past was borrowed by a woman from Gowa's court simply does not make sense as anillu stration of this characterization of Gowa's treatment of kalompoang. Even if this manuscript was never

23° Cummings (2003: 537, note 5). 231 Cummings (2003: 537).

201 returned, how it wound up in her hands was neitherviole nt, nor fo r that matter could one

really call it straightforward, to "seize" such an object by borrowing it.

Rather than "seizing" manuscripts to "control the past and present," as Gowa may,

or may not, have been doing, Bone, by contrast, appears instead to have been producing

/ontaraq, not to control the past and the present, so much as to produce political effects:

to extend the reach of Bone's authority - textual, genealogical and political. This was not

only done by producing /ontaraq of and for other people's 11traditions11 but was also

achievedthrough the issuance of, fo r instance, testimonials and sailing passes, which I

will return to below.

Reworking how non-Bugis groups fit into a past centered on Bone, at least as a source of legitimacy and recognition, was partof this /ontaraq production in which the medium of manuscripts was as important as the message. For instance, the Mandar nobility of South Sulawesi, who attempted to consolidate their ties to prestigious

Buginese, Makassarese and other nobility through strategic marriages (George 1991: 548

3 in Volkman 1994: 582, note 17) have what could be called a political myth2 2 in which adat is conveyed from Bone in the form of a lontaraq:

One nice example of Mandar links to morepowerful royalty in South Sulawesi is fo und in a Mandar /ontar manuscript, which tells of a time of lawlessness in Balanipa, when disputes were resolved through ordeals (men fought, women plunged their hands in boiling water). To bring order to the realm, the ruler of Balanipa sent an emissaryto the Bugis kingdom of Bone, where he requested adat (customary law) from Bone. In the fo rm of a lontar manuscript, the adat was bestowed upon the emissary, who sailed home with 33 it to Mandar. 2

232 On "political myth" in the Malay world, see P.E. de Josselin de Jong (1980 and 1975: especiallyp.305). 233 Muthalibet at. 1989 in Volkman 1994: 582, note 17.

202 In short, Mandar. adat or "customarylaw," borne by a Mandar ruler's emissary, arrives in

a lontaraq from Bone.

Before I go on to discuss other sorts of lontaraq held by Sarnapeople, such as testimonials and sailing passes, I would first like to turn back to LB Lemobajo, in order to consider the likelihood of its production by Bone and to address in greater detail the question of how the path it has travelled relates to what it signifies.

Above, I described a "genealogical method" of political expansion that would likely have been backed by a certain degree of textual authority, and that texts attesting to high status descent in such a context would likely have become heirloom objects inherited by the progeny of unions between different descent groups, in other words, I am suggesting, between Bugis and Sarna. At what point, or how exactly it came about that

Bugis language lontaraq would attest not only to links with Bone but also would serve to

"substantiate" the high-status descent ofnon-Bugis lineages, here, Sarna ones - through both their contents as well as in the practices of how they are treated - is a matter we can

(at least at present) only come at indirectly.

Chapter fo ur was basically an attempt to approach this question through a comparative examination of Sarnastories about the past and an analysis the process of how subordination is narratively euphemized. The analysis carried out in that chapter suggests that LB Lemobajo was not simply a tool to recognize particular Sarna lineages as high-status, but that it aimed to do so in a way that would euphemize what might otherwise be taken as a relation of subordination between Sarnapeople (or particular

Sarna lineages) and the prominent South Sulawesi kingdoms of Gowa, and in later portions of the manuscript, Bone. This euphemization would, moreover, also deflect

203 ------�---·-

questions about the gendered aspect of the structure of this relationship. That is, this story

of the past would, in the end, illustrate an elite inter-ethnic union in which the Sarna

woman, and her kin by association, did not come off(retrospectively) with a lowered

status but on the contrary, events were presented in such a way that the narrative

explicitly acknowledged and further legitimated their high status, and in particular hers.

On the one hand, then; it is clear that alontaraq such as LB Lemobajo is an

example of a text that attests to such inter-ethnic unions. In the sort of political expansion

I have described, it serves as a "proof' of genealogical links to Gowa and Bone, as well

as a medium of the extension of Bone's political authority. Yet at the same time, on the

other hand, this fo ntaraq is quite clearly about the Sarnapast, both in the eyes of Sarna

people and in the ways they treatsuch lontaraq in practice, as well as from the thrust of

the narrative and the audience key parts of it imply. Both in narrative content and in how

it is treatedas an object in social practice, it emphatically attests to the elite status of the

Sarna lineage.

We do not know precisely who produced LB Lemobajo or in what circumstances

it was written, but there is littledoubt that it was produced in the late nineteenth

34 centu� and no doubt that the Sarna elite lineages it sets out to recognize and to

legitimate are addressed in a Bugis mode of inscription and from a Bone-centered

"historiography," for as mentioned earlier, other parts of the manuscript afterthe initial

234 Russell Jones offered his professional estimation of two fragments ftom LB Lemobajo, which he thinks probably dates ftom the latter half of the 19thcentury. Other evidence fo r this dating, in relation to migration histories ofthe owners, is discussed below. In 1990Mahmud indicatedthat his "grandparent" (nenek), and probably therefore also Molana's, was the writer of the lontaraq. But no other evidence of this exists, and there is no explicit indication of time or place of "authorship," let alone who the writer was, in the pages of the manuscript extant at the time of photocopying.

204 5 storyof the Sarnaprincess and her marriage to Gowa royalcy23 resemble portions of the

Chronicle of Bone.

Aside from this, however, there is a good deal of evidence to support the

likelihood that LB Lemobajo was produced by Bone fo r the purpose of authoritatively recognizingthe legitimacy of a particular Sarna (or, in Bugis, "Bajo") lineage. This evidence appearsboth in the manuscript as well as in oral interviewmater ials from its owners. This oral evidence indicates that LB Lemobajo must have travelled quite a bit in the earlytwentieth century, and it also delivers some confirmation about the gendered structure of the relationship between Bone and the Sarna people with whom it had lineage ties. Let us turn firstto what interviews helped clarify about gender andthe manuscript contents, and then to the path travelled by LB Lemobajo, fo llowing the movements of those who inherited and looked after it.

LB Lemobajo contains a list of Bajo rulers. Like genealogies, lists of rulers have a special ideological power in that they presentthem selves as neutral documentation, distillations of realityand faits accomplis, but inrepresenting the most favorableview of outcomes (favorable to someone or another}, they erasenearly all signsof practice, struggle and negotiation. Lists of rulersand royal genealogies, especially, are patently

2 6 ideological expressions of legitimation. 3

Given thelim itations ofBugis orthography, when I first learnedthe names of these Bajo rulers listed inthe lontaraq I noted them down. This, it was explained to me, was the susunan� the order, of the raja or sultan Bajo:

23s Admittedly, theseare ties to a Gowa ruler whose title is Sombaya, "the Somba," referred to sometimes in Bugis as "Torisompae," which is also a psedonym fo r Arung Palakka. 236 On another list of rulers, one from Aceh, that slips almost unnoticably between sequential but very different erasand approaches to rule, seeSiegel ( 1979: 1-31) .

205 151 (from Ussuq named) "Papu" 2 Puan ri Pasanna 3 Toappa 4 I Galimbo 5 I Makku 6 I Palatei 7 I Makku{2°d) 8 IWawo

While the lontaraq does not indicate whether they were men or women, in my first meeting with Molana (the inheritor) and her husband Haji Mahmud, they explained that, "All the raja Bajo are women, except I Papu, up to the eighth and last." In addition, my notes fromthat time specify, somewhat tentatively: "Their husbands are from the govt?"237 At the time I did not know to what "government" this was thought to refer.

Although Tiworo is somewhat closer physically to the Sultanate of Buton and has a late- colonial history of being administratively linked with Buton or Muna, I later learned in conversations with Lo Kader that prior to a period of Dutch administration starting in the early twentieth century, Sarnapeople in Tiworo (and in other regions as well) recognized an era of rule by Bone (''parenta Bone").

It is worth dwelling fo r a moment on the connections between this list and the people who held the lontaraq. The last name in the list, "I Wawo," also known as Lo

Wawo or Lo Basa, turns out to have been an older sibling of the current inheritor's mother (i.e., Wawo was a. sibling of Hindong or Nindong, Molana's mother). When last I visited Lemobajo, Haji Mahmud mentioned that Lo Wawo had been "installed as the

Sarna ruler in Bajoe, (but) before carrying out (duties), disbanded."238 The question was,

237 Fieldnotes, Lemobajo, 27 September I 990. Their all being women also liekly relates to why the unique ula-u/a Sarnabanner ofLemobajo undeniably, and verifiably, has a female fo rm. 238 My notes actually say "Last one di/antik sebagai Datu Soma in Bajoe. Belum menja/ankan, bubar," with an arrow pointing from "last one" to the names "Lo Wawo = Lo Basa." Fieldnotes, Haji Mahmud, Lemobajo, 3 March 2000.

206 "installed" by whom? And what "disbanded"? Was Wawo installed by the Dutch, or by

Bone, and in either case, when'P- 39

According to Haji Mahmud, the lontaraq had been brought from Bajoe, historically a Sarnasettlement at the coast of Bone. He specified that his father had brought it, and whether or not this was in fact the case (since his wife inherited it), it does indeed appear that the families of his father and uncle (that is, his in-laws) leftBa joe fo r points east. Haji Mahmud'sfa ther (Tanjeng) and his uncle (Aco - his wife Molana's father) had been born at Bajoe, and Molana's mother (Hindong /Nindong) may have been

240 too. Not only did the families of these brothers move east, but their parents' and their parents' siblings did too; these included the father ofHindong and Lo Wawo.

This extended family, which collectively had an interestin the lontaraq and what it represented, left Bajoe, shifted residence a number of times, and did not all settle in the same place. The family ofTanjeng's father, Lalabi (Haji Mahmud'spaternal grandfather), moved first to Boepinang, then to Tinobu, and then to Lemobajo. Other siblings,

241 including Puah Datuand Haji Kullang (all male) wound up in Lemobajo. Another brother, Haji Ali, wound up in Puupi, a long bay to the north ofTiworo; and Lo Pilla

242 (also a brother) settled in Pulo Balu.

239 Related to the question of what "disbanded" is another question of ruler over what/whom? The answerto "over what" is not as obvious or simple as one might think it should be. For even if part of the answer is, as the informant indicated, over "Bajoe," the "proof" ofdescent, the recognition by Bone's authority and the genealogical ties remained socially and politically productive fo r Sarna people long afterwards, indeed to the present. 240 Fieldnotes, Lemobajo, 27 September 1990. Although as mentioned earlier, Haji Sitti A lang, another of Hindong's daughters, ascribed Hindong's birthplace asPulo Maginti in Tiworo. She aslo said that Hindong's father was named Jemulong, whereas my 2000 notes with Haji Mahmud call him "Puah Datu," suggesting that he had some fo rm ofofficial local authority. Fieldnotes, Haji SittiAlang, Boepinang, 11 April 2000; and Fieldnotes Lemobajo 3 March 2000. 24 Lalabi and Haji Kullang are both reportedly buried at Pulo Karamaby Tinobu, which itself is about ten minutes from Lemobajo. 242 Lo Pilla married thedaughter ofBesse and Kapitalao Pabitte, the latter "if among the Bugis" (kalau di Bugis) was known as Daeng Marakka.

207 Haji Mahmud said that his father's family left Bajoe because it "didn't agree"

(tidak cocok) with them. He himself was born in Lemobajo in 1920,243 well after his

father's family had leftBa joe. If the series of residence shifts from Bajoe to Boepinang to

Tinobu and then Lemobajo took place over the course of ten or fifteen years, which seems quite likely as they were not on some kind of fishing trip butrat her "moved villages" (pindah kampung), then it is fairly safe to say that their departure from Bajoe probably came in connection with the Dutch defeat of Bone in 1905.

This; then, is a picture of textual transmission in which it appears that Bone, in recognizing the genealogical authority of particular Sarna lineages, also through this medium extended its own political authority "over," or perhaps it would be better to say

"to," Sarna people settled on nearby coasts. The textual transmission could continue to have relevance on paths away from Bone, through processes of resettlement, in part because the lontaraq itself was concerned with lineage ideology, and not, fo r instance, with conferring authority (or other fo rms of title) over a particular place.

This was not the firsttime that war between Bone and the Dutch drove Sarna people to depart from Bajoe. Vosmaer mentions that during the Bone war of 1824 and

1825, Luwu, and in particularthe Palopo region of the Gulf of Bone, provided a place of asylum or refuge for the Bajo people ofBadj oe (Badjoa) and fo r others as well. He was assured that at the time, more than two hundred houses had been erected at the mouth of the Pasalui River. But since that time, by 1833 when he visited Palopo, the conjunction of people had slowly come apart again until finally, theBa jo people, no longer finding sufficient patronage from the(other) natives -which to them was still perceived as a

243 Fieldnotes, Lemobajo, 3 March 2000.

208 guarantee - again dispersed. When Vosmaerwas there in 1833, there was no longer a single house to be found (Vosmaer 1839: 73).

The families ofTanjeng, Aco and Hindong, and their parents, aunts andunc les were .not,therefore, the firstto leave Badjoe as a result of hostilities there between the

Dutch and Bone. But when they left,they took proof of their status and their links to the rulers ofBone, materials that would continue to serve them despite their departure in a

"disbanding," or sudden dispersal of the settlement. The timing of their departure, before

Mahmud's birth in 1920, and preceding a series of moves in which they lived in a number of villages before resettling in Lemobajo, not only coincides with the arrival of the Dutch.

It also suggests that LB Lemobajo itself was probably inscribed in the late nineteenth or the very earlytwen tieth century.

Although Vosmaer does not mention the use of texts by Sarna people, he does describe that when he was in Celebes, different groups of Sarnapeople claimed ties to both Gowa andBone, and that the latter "appointed" people to titled positions:

Up to the presentday they still consider themselves,when not residingin Government territory, subjects of Gowa or Bone. Those who, in the Sumanap, or as the Makassarese say, Kangiang Islands areknown under the name of Sadoelangs, as well as those who live in the Makassar Straits, acknowledge the Raja of Gowa as (their) patron. While those belonging to this clan and wandering about elsewhere mostly want to have themselves considered subjects of Bone. One presently findsleaders among them appointed by Bone under the appellation of Lolo, Glarang, Poengawa and Kapitein; but being for the mostpart now also gone fromthat land and scattered hereand there, so it is presently the heads chosen by themselves, without the intervention of Bone, to whom they hold. They choose the aforementioned by succession from those among them who on account of birthare entitled to it under the names of Lolo, Glarangor Poengawa, in popular parlanceoften combinedunder the, for them, deferential title of respect, Elders {Orang Toewa} (Vosmaer 1839: 127).

209 Vosmaer therefore indicates that in areas around western, south and southeast

Celebes, Sarna of his time recognized Gowa or Bone as a patron. In groups more or less east of Makassar, theydrew their leaders from the pool of people who were descendants of those acknowledged or appointed by Bone, yet the decision of who should serve as a leader was not up to such patrons. While some Sarnapeople in the nineteenth century thus considered themsleves "subjects" of Bone, they did so in a way that nevertheless enabled them to be at the tenuous limits of Bone's political reach. Although they looked to Bone as a source of legitimate recognition, they were nonetheless at the edge of governance andBone's control over them was slight. This positioning at the edge of governance applied not only in relation to Bone, but also in relation to Gowa and the

Dutch as well. One gets the sense, moreover, from this description, that there was a certain degree of fluidityto such allegiances, which could shiftaccording to context:

"when they are not in Governmentterritory ... " Similarly, it is not as though an impermeablewall separated Sarnapeople in the Makassar Straits fr om those in the Gulf

244 of Bone and elsewhere. Quite the contrary, having some mobility (but one hesitates to call it "nomadic") enabled people to take their credentials along when they relocated, and to use them in the interstices where the structures of political and social recognition flowed not according to a metonymy of alliegances with lands, but converged and crossed in liquid territory.

While above, I discussed the dissemination of lontaraq in the context of an expansion ofBugis - and especially Bone's - authority, an expansion with roots in a

244 Some ofthe genealogical data I gathered in Tiworo and the western Gulf of Bone also pointed to kin links with Sarnapeople in the regions of Selayar, Makassar and Maros (not to mention settlements in Kupang, Papua and Jakarta). The Imam of Poso's main mosque, who has close Sarna kin in Tiworo, has also kindly provided materials that touch on the connections to Sarnafrom the Salabanka Islands.

210 political innovation of the seventeenth century, below, I consider how lontaraq were used

in the nineteenth century in ways that bear on their dissemination in Sarnacommunities

and on how contemporary Sarnapeople treat them.

In thinking about the nineteenth century, I take a cue fr om Joanne Rappaport

( 1987). She examines how Paez notions of textual authority were enmeshed in the

practices of Spanish colonial bureaucracy, itself saturated with the importance of

documents. In that context, documents became a fo rm of"social praxis" (Vidal 1985: 31

in Rappaport 1987: 4 7) -the means by which individuals could inject themselves into the colonial bureaucracy and influence decision-making (Joanne Rappaport 1987: 47).

I am interested in a kind of inversion of this picture. Outside ofMakassar, Dutch power in the region was rather limited. Instead of a social praxis where individuals used documents to inject themselves into a colonial bureaucracy, since the Dutch bureaucracy was rather thinly spread in these parts, where it existed at all, I am concerned with how they insinuated themselves into local structures of authority and in the process altered the ways that manuscripts were important in them.

Alongside the nineteenth century traffic in manuscripts, then, there were other reasons fo r why, besides acquisitiveness and scholarly fascination, the Dutch were interested in locally owned manuscripts. Manuscripts, and especially genealogies, were important to the Dutch fo r they enabled them to recognize local people of worth, whose cooperation - if not cooptation - they sought. The Dutch also "recorded" genealogies and it was not at all an unusual occurrence in the archives to come across the genealogies of local notables painstakingly recorded in early twentieth centurycolonial records of the

211 Dutch in Celebes. 245 And already in the nineteenth century, hereand there around

southern Sulawesi, the Dutch were engaged in the practice of officially recognizing

native elites and bestowing the trappings of entitlement.246 This is fairly remarkable since

most regions outside of Java were not conquered until the early twentieth century.Yet it

was, rather, through earlier structures of indirect rule that the Dutch got into the gam� of

conferring official recognition of "native authority.""Native authorities," in tum,

sometimes borrowed the symbolism of the Dutch in their texts, as we shall see below.

Some of the manuscripts that Sarnapeople now consider to be lontaraq heirloom

objects were simple documents of recognition by the highest powers, a genre that

included, fo r instance, letters of introduction, testimonials, and special travel documents.

These were all official certifications or attestations concerning the recipient, and were

addressed openly to a non·specific audience in a public space that might reach across the archipelago. The genre must have been common enough to have some significance when, fo r instance, a letter was carried back to NortheastBorneo across the Straits of Makassar from Gowa, yet also special and rare enough to bearthe weight of Gowa's recognition in

245 The Dutch would later benefit from these efforts when, in the 1920's and 1930's they sought to "re­ install" figures, usually fromprior rulingfa milies or competing factions, in the guise of re-establishing "traditional rule." Henk Schulte Nordholt (1994) offers an excellent illustration of this process in Bali. In the sultanate ofButon, a similar phenomenon is still bitterly recalled by rival fam ilies/factions to this day. The collection of the kraton's colonial archives, held privately by the grandson of that court's archivist/scribe, very clearly reflects a paper trail in which "traditional" structures of rule were also "resurrected" in the late colonial period. 246 Ammarell ( 1999) notes thatthe in the 1870's, the Dutch, in the interests of increasing copra production and decreasing the threat of piracy, recognizeda locally prominent man who had emigrated to the Sabalana islands southwest ofMakassar in the Flores Sea. They recognized him as gal/orang (there is some confusion in Ammarell's text as to whether he already had this status and the Dutch acknowledged it, or whetherthey bestowed it on him) when he agreedto share control of the Saba lana islands with them. They sold him fo ur of the islands and awarded him a salary, a guarantee of security fo r the islands, and three "stars": a bronze cross for accomplishment, and a small and big silver star. Memorie van Overgave van de Assistent Resident van Makassar, N.C. Beudeker, 1948 (Leiden: KITLV) in Ammarell l999: 44,46. Unfortunately, Ammarell reportsno lontaraq, but the Dutch were obviously in the business of establishing indirect ruleeven if in a piece-meal fashion in such an out-of-the-way place, and clearly, their bestowal of dazzlingob jects thatmight become regalia or heirlooms and which symbolized political stature played a role in the social and political recognition of these figuresby others.

212 a way that was meaningful in the eyes of others to whom it might be shown. More or less

letterspatent, such documents held by Sarnapeople did not remain open fo r inspection,

but instead became heirloom objects to be stored away from the eyes of others. This 7 genre would have been familiar to the Dutch as well,24 yet in the nineteenth century,

Sarna people received such documents from Gowa and Bone.

Although Vosmaer did not mention any texts amongthe Sarnapeople he met, we are fortunate to have at least one historical reference to Sarnapossession of a testimonial from Gowa prior to 1855:

In the past, pirates from Blahnjiehnjeh {sic., Balangingi?} also came here (to northeast Borneo)to disturb the Badjau's, causing these to settleat Tondoni andToli-toli on the coast of Celebes for about a year, at which time the Badjau's returned to Pulau-pandjang andwere no longer bothered. They had hoisted a Dutch flag as a sign of theirsub jection to the "company," and the panggawa possessed an open letter from theking of Gowa as a pass or 8 recommendation. 24

Like the testimonial held by Haji Kua which camefr om a nineteenth century

Queen of Bone, Gowa saw fit to issue similar documents to Sarna people within its purview, in this case, to Sarnawho usually dwelt on the northeast coast of Borneo but who had temporarily shifted location due to harassmentby pirl:l,tes. Not only had these

Sarna received an open letter from the king of Gowa as a kind of "pass or recommendation," they alsocarried a flagfrom the Dutch as a sign of their "subjection"

247 Sailing passes were "compulsory" both during and afterthe VOC period (Heersink 1995: 77). The Portuguese required ships enteringparticular Asian ports to carry passes, "cartaz," in the l61h century (inter alia: Pearson 1976; Subrahmanyam 2000). In the 16m century, letters of marque legitimized the plunder of those (private individuals) carrying out war on behalf of European royals (Benton 2003). 248 "Vroeger kwamen hier ook zeeschuimers van Blahnjiehnjeh de badjau's ontrusten, waarom deze #ch te Tondoni en Toli-toli, op dekust van Celebes, nederzetten tot voor ongeveer eenjaar, wanneer de badjau's naar Poe/QJI-pandjangwedergekeerd waren, en niet meer werden ontrust. Zijhadden en hollandshe vlag als teeken hunnerond erwerping aan de 'kompaniealt gehesen, en de panggawa bezat een open brief van de koning van Goa. als pas of aanbeveling." Von Dewall 1855: 446. Thisarticle, while "by" von Dewall, has a note on its last page indicatingthat it was communicated (medegedeeld) by Hageman.

213 to "the company. " How people used their flagwas importantto the Dutch, and it is no contradiction that at this time, the same Sarnareturning to Pulau Pandjang should carry a

Dutch flag in addition to a letter from the king of Gowa, as the Dutch had control of

Makassar, or at least monopolized its trade.

One would not, however, expect a Sarnaperson sailing from Bone at around the same time, that is, prior to 1855, to bear aroyal testimonial in one hand and a Dutch flag

h in the other, because in the 1850's, the Dutch, despite having been allies in the 1 i century, were considerable rivals ofBone.249 In fact, as tensions in the mid-nineteenth century rose between Bone and Makassar, Bone's fe male ruler, Basse Kaj uara (1857-

1859) ordered all Bugis vessels to sail with the Dutch flag flyingupside down. This, indeed, was the immediate reason fo r the expeditionaryfo rce sent by the Dutch against

Bone in 1859 (the Second Bone War). This war resulted in the end of Bone's

0 independence, after which they had the official status of a "vassal. "25

The "open letter" fromthe king of Gowa that was both a pass and a recommendation may well have resembled a later"le tter of introduction" in which the

Dutch "acknowledged" Nakhoda Manting, probably in the early twentieth century.251

Nakhoda Manting was a well-known Sarna trader whom many Sarnapeople in the

Tiworo region, quite a fe w in local positions of power, claim as a their grandfather or great-grandfather.

249 Theywere rivals in a sea of competitors, however, and one which prompted the Dutch to change the title governor of Malcassar togove rnor of Celebes and Dependencies in an attempt to show any European rivals, especially, that the Dutch sphere of influence encompassedall of South Sulawesi.Poelinggomang 1991:69-80 and Ikthisar 1973: 268-269 inHeers ink 1995: 76. 250 Heersink 1995: 76; Locher-Scholten 1991: 147 251 "Diakuiorang Be/anda, diberi surat pengenal." "Acknowledged by the Dutch, he was given a letter of introduction." Unsolicited mention of this came from Haji Buraera. Haji Buraera (born in Pulo Balu) eventually worked as a traderfo r 01-Til afterconsiderable experience on the vessel of his father, Haji Usman, a son ofNakhoda Manting and Manihing. Fieldnotes, Haji Buraera, Ranteangin, March 6, 2000.

214 Another example of this genre, part sailing pass, part character reference, and sign of links to higher powers, was a document issued by Bone in 1888 to a Sarnaman named

Hamma:

Sureq lopi-lopi Letter of boat travel

Majeppu Arumpone pa warekkengi seuwa In truth the Arung of Bone issues this letter sureq pallopi-lopi Puang Hamma Gellareng to the sailor Puang Hamma Gellarang Bajo Bajo muka maelo na nala tanra nattuppui since he wishes to create a sign of a strong masseq lao sappai dalleq hallalaqna nakegi­ connection to go to seek his legitimate living in kegi wanua nattuppui uwaddennuanganngi ri whatever land he visits I hope that the Arung in arung mapparentae ri wanuwae natulunngi ko charge of that village may help him if there are engka maelo gauq bawanngi ri alempurenna, any who wish to abuse his integrity. Ifs/he narekko natulunngi, tanaena ri Bone natulung assists (him), (then) slhe helps the land of Bone sibawa Arumpone namuatutui Gellareng along with the Arumpone. Guard your honesty lempue sarekku wammenngi aga mumalampe and the prohibitions of the government in the ri-asennanegennge enrennge rideceng mupo lands you enter, Gellareng, so that you will manasae. Salamaq. become long (lived) in the pleasure and Ta mat kalam bil khaeri aj main. goodness to which you aspire. Peace. The letter Nariuki ri Bone ri esso na Salasa ri 23 uleng ends with all its good (wishes). Written at Bone, 252 Rajab 1305 (AH). Tuesday, 5 April 1888 (CE).

Below this text the pass also bears a short (largely illegible) note in Dutch fr om the Bone harbormaster dated 1890, what appears to be a notation of arrival or departure from Medan stamped and dated 1893, and on the reverse side, in Arabic script, an undated acknowledgement of passage to Tembuku. At the top of the pass there is a royal seal.

252 For those who read Indonesian: "Sural keperahuan (pelayaran). Sesungguhnya Arumpone memperpegangkan selembar sural pe/ayar Puang Hamma Gellarang Bajo karena dia mau menjadikan Ianda pegangan kual pergi mencari rezeki ha/alnya di mana saja kampung didatang(.)ikuhara pkan (alau: 'dilaporkan? pada A rung pemerinlah di dalam kampung supaya menolongnya kalau ada yang mau me/alimi dengan kejujurannya. Kalau dia meno/ong, lanah di Bonelah dia tolong dengan Arumpone. Engkau jaga wahai Gellarang kej ujuran dan /arangan pemerintahnya kampung yang engkau masuki agar supaya engkau menjadipan jang di dalam kesenangan dan kebaikan yang engkau dambakan (cila-cilakan). Selamat. Tarnal berita disertai kebaikan semuanya (in Arabic). Dilulis di Bone pada hari Selasa langga/23 bulan Rajah 1305." The middle bit could also be read: " .. .in whatever village visited, report to the local authorities in that village so that they may help him, should there beany who wish to abuse his honesty" or " ...help him with integrity if any wish to abuse him ..." I gratefully acknowledge receipt of a photocopy of this sureq /opi-lopi from Haji Umar Nanga, Imam Mesji Poso (sent 4 July 2000), and I thank both him and Muhammad Salim fo r their somewhat different suggested Indonesian translations.

215 The use of royal seals on official documents was common in Sulawesi royal

courts, partof a well-established genre of islamic seal inscriptions in Southeast Asia

(Gallop 2002). Nineteenth century royal letters written in Bugis, that is to say, in the

Bugis language and using lontaraq script, also bore such Islamic seals. For instance, one

published example bears the seal of Arumpone Ahmad al-Salih, who ruled Bone fr om

1775 to 1812. While the text of the letter is in Bugis, the seal itself is in Arabic, with the

name of the ruler and an invocation stating: "may God immortalize his realm and dominion of Bone. 253

The format ofHamma's letterof boat travel, as well as Haji Kua's testimonial, are basically the same, with a seal stamped above the text of the letter. However the seal fo und at the top of these two lontaraq is strikingly different from the Islamic seals previously used in Bone and in other parts of Islamic Southeast Asia. Unfortunately,

Christian Petras did not mention this detail in his article, disappointed, perhaps, that when

HajiKua's husband showed him the testimonial it turned out not to be a narrative of the

Sarna past. Both Haji Kua's testimonial and Hamma's sureq lopi-lop i bear the seal of

Fatimah Banri, a queen who ruled Bone from 1871 to 1895. Ratherthan the ruler's name in Islamic script and an Arabic invocation to the Almighty, this oval seal contains instead the silhouette of two lions flanking a crown. Surrounded by two rings with text, the inner one contains Fatimah Banri's name written in Bugis orthography, and in the outer ring, in latin script, is "Fatimah Banri" along the top, and "Vorstin van Boni" along the bottom.

The image in the center, with the two lions and the crown, is very close to the Dutch royal coat of arms, which appeared on the center band of the Dutch Royal Standard until

1909, and thus would have been fa miliar to many people in the Indies.

253 Gallop with Arps (1991: 109), and personal communication Gallop (fortranslation ofthe seal).

216 Although Bone officially became a "vassal" (leen) after 1859� local memory

among Sarna people in Tiworo and elsewhere remembers a period of Bone government

("parenta Bone") fo llowed by a Dutch administration that was not established until the

254 early twentieth century, after the fall of Bone in 1905. Sarna people regard these letters

as lontaraq issued by Bone, which indeed they are. That the symbols of the Dutch crown

were appropriated into "native" textual practice, however, indicates that the Dutch were by this time already implicated in local forms of political authority, and in the process

255 changed them.

Through such documents, as through narratives and genealogies, lontaraq manuscripts demonstrate to Sarna people their own links to the past and to "history," and serve above all as a sign and a means to substantiate their claims to be descendants of high-status Sarnalineages. Less a "sign of the modem" as Dirks (1990) would say, they are, to borrow a phrase from Keane ( 1997), signs of recognition. What I have tried to do in this chapter is to show some of the social history that such manuscripts help to illuminate. Ra!Qer than a philological history of texts, I have examined a history in which manuscripts are objects in social practice. Nor is this a history organized by reference to a particularplace, but by the paths that these objects take in the social relations to which they are pertinent, paths that cross the waters. Like other heirloom objects, manuscripts are wrapped up in anxieties about status, which really only means something, or means something worthy, when it is recognized by others. These manuscripts, inflected in novel ways in new contexts, produced different valences. Yet they continued to buttress claims

254 The Bugis stoty of the fall of Bone in 1905 and the capture of its ruler at thetime, La Pawawoi, is relatively well-known, and recounted in a historical metered verse known asthe Toloq Rumpaqna Bone (Mallaq 1991;Tol 2000). 2S.sForshee (2001) discussesthe incorporation of Dutch heraldic lions (and otherfo reign motifs) in Sumbanese cloths as emblems of the local aristocracy's alliances with outsiders.

217 to political authority and status worthiness and to serve as a means fo r their recognition

by others - not just other Sama people but to non-Sama people as well. Partaking, among

contemporary Sama communities, in a fo rm of textual authority that manifests itself

through practices of inheritance and borrowing, lontaraq were also important in practices

of inter-ethnic status acknowledgement.

Inadd ition, lontaraq were treated as emblems of links to the past and of inclusion

in networks of impressive political authority. Even as the possession of such manuscriptc;

always indexed an "ascribed" elite descent, such links and inclusions - "political,"

"historical" - that a lontaraq demonstrated did not always have to be genealogical.

Nothing drove this home more fo rcefully than the other materials that I was

shown in Kambuno at the time Haji Kua allowed me to see the testimonial inherited by

her husband and carried in flight across the Gulf by her daughter. In addition to the testimonial, there was a letter fo r Haji Kua's husband from the Department of Culture

official who had accompanied Pelras on his brief visit in 1968. With the letter, he had enclosed two things, one of which was a "foto" that the author of the letter suggested be put on display for others to see. Either this was a photograph that I was not shown; or it could possibly refer to the photocopy of Petras' 1972 article256 (which does, in fa ct, also contain photographic images). Theother thing the Department of Culture official enclosed was a typed list of the rulers of Bone going back a thousand years, with Fatimah

Banri's name in it capitalized, emphasizing thatthis was the ruler in question in the testimoniaL At the top, this list bore the title: "Compilation of the Lontara' of Bone"

("Susunan Lontarana Bone"), and in parentheses, "Historyof the kingdom of Bone"

("Sedjarah Keradjaan Bone"). The list of the rulers of Bone did not indicate Bone's loss

2S6 I am grateful to Nancy Florida fo r pointing out this possibility.

218 of independence in 1860, nor its fall in 1905; it offered no hint at the shifts in political

authority that accompanied these events, but rather, as an unbroken list, it implied

continuity. What mattered in the present context were the connections of the lontaraq

owners to this list and their inclusion in the networks it touched. Signifying such

connection and inclusion was the "historical" purpose of lontaraq:

"With this letter," wrote the official,

I enclose a photo from France. Hopefullyyou can make fo r it a place that can be seen every day by all the people who come to witness the existence and way of life of the Sarna people, as the whole World has witnessed with their own eyes, since it has already been entered into the French lontaraq of history."

This is not to say that these Sarnapeople became "subjects" of France. Rather, what was important was that through their testimonial from Fatimah Banri and the list of

Bone's rulers, they had been incorporated into, acknowledged under the "shadow" as it

257 were, of the purview of France's knowledge ofhistory.

What /ontaraq are "doing" in Sarnacommuni ties requires an integrative approach from history, anthropology and literature. As Brake! said now two decades ago, and as

Henk Schulte Nordholt reiterated a decade ago inrelation to Balinese genealogical narratives, one needs an integrative approach through these varied fields in order to analyitcally situate these texts within the dynamics of their "own society" and the

258 changing complexities of "their" political structures. For an examination of lontaraq texts among Sarna communities, this also requires that one situate manuscripts within their disparate entanglements, in order, as Thomas said, to glimpse the histories of which

257 Compare the lists of Acehnese rulersand governors in Siegel (1979). 2S8 Brakel (1980: 44). in Schulte Nordholt(1 994: 261). Also see P.E. de Josselin de Jong (1975: 305).

219 they are a part, historieswhich, despite being linked, are not for all that necessarily shared.

220 Chapter 6

Ambivalent incorporation: Sama people and the Darul lslam rebellion

This chapterexamines Sarna experiences in the Tiworo Straits during the 1950's

Darul Is lam - Tentara Islam Indonesia conflict (DI-TII, Darul Islam - Indonesian Islamic

Anny) in Sulawesi.259 While nationalist historiography figuresthe DI-Til conflict as a rebel movement defeated by the central government's army(TNI, Te ntara Nasional

Indonesia), narrativized experiences in local memories tell different stories. Caught in the middle, coastal people developed tactics to keep the suspicions and violence of each side at bay. Yet such tactics did not always work against the movement's strategies of expansion.

DI-Til in Sulawesi was, in part, a rejection of certain aspects of military institutionalization and national integration. Yet despite this eminently modem, state- fo cused structure of understanding, DI-TII's expansion drew upon longstanding methods of subordinating other groups and co-opting theirassistance through the practice of fo rging new kin ties. Kidnap and coerced marriage,however, produced an ambivalent incorporation of "supporters," as well as retaliation by some Sarnapeople.

2'9 I use eitherthe acronym, "01-Til," as people in the fielddid, as "Darul lslam," literallythe Abode, or Domain, oflslam, to refer to this rebellion (or armed "movement") during the 1950's.

221 This chapter highlights the story of ahigh-status Sarnawoman, Nurdija,

kidnapped and married to a Bugis man in DI-Til's leadership.260 Her story and the

ambivalence of her incorporation into new kin networks raise questions about the

regional reproduction of stratification across descent groups. The chapter also explores

the response of her kin to her kidnapping - their retaliation and subsequent flight- and

how it is represented through diffe rent sources. In addition, consideration is given to

Nurdija's own efforts to keep silent about who among her kin retaliated, helping thereby

to avert a cycle of revenge. Her efforts to remain mute on this point suggest that the

character of revenge then was much more specificallystructured than it now appears to

be in contemporary Indonesia.

Sarna people were not the major players in the Sulawesi branch of the Darul Islam

rebellion, which was dominated by Bugis people.261 Yet, once I had heard a Sarnaman pointedly refer to this conflictnot as a rebellion, but as a civil war, perang saudara,

literally a war of siblings, I became more interested in trying to understand not only how

Sarna people were caught in between the warring parties, but how some, although they tried to avoid it, nonetheless became caught up in it.

My interest in how Sarnapeople related to others during this conflicthad, I think, a great deal to do with events in Indonesia during the time I conducted research. From

1998 - 2000 there was a dramatic increase in various fo rmsof inter-group conflictin

Indonesia. This steep increase in violence and the facile generalizations sometimes made about its causes (economic exclusions, economic turfbat tles, colonial era political marginalization, a colonial historyof divide and rule), made me realize how much the

260 Some names have been changed. 261 Other branches of DI-Til were in West Java and Aceh, and to some degree in Kalimantan as well.

222 details of particular conflicts were often overlooked or undercontextualized. In addition, a

sensibility, borne perhaps of the topics and conditions of my own research, critical of the tendency - in part, a legacy of colonial knowledge production - to compartmentalize

scholarship on different descent groups, made me keenly aware of the limited tools and

sources at our disposal to understand, historically and ethnographically, the histories and memories at play in contemporary "inter-group" violent conflicts andhow these conflicts differ from or share continuities with the past.

During the period of my research, about fo rty thousand "internally displaced people'' from Ambon and other parts of the Malukus "returned" to nearby Buton, where they had never before lived; while close friends from the town of Raha where I often stayed were actively engaged in quelling attempts to incite violence on the island of

Muna. They received multiple threats fo r their repeated, and effective, efforts to defuse tensions and create peace. The conditions of "peace" called fo r no less effort, and, it often seemed, no less explanation, thanthose of "violence." At times, creating the former and its conditions of possibility were as much the result of concerted efforts as were attempts to avoid "worse" forms of the latter. These efforts, often pursued before the "need" fo r

"conflict resolution," sometimes seemed as if they were barely two steps ahead of a more pressing call for conflict avoidance. They were "band-aids," tenuous and applied haphazardly, that kept Muna frombeing dragged into a potentially very ugly place. They barely touched on the broader conditions - economic, social, political, military - that contributed to the conditions fo r "unrest," and generally did not seek to redress structural injustices. Yet at the same time, in "successfully" defusing tensions fo r the time being and avoiding escalation to more serious hostility and bloodshed, these timely little "band-

223 aids" turned out to be extremely important. They gotme curious, moreover, about similar

"small" efforts to subvert violence in Tiworo in the 1950's.

I went into research on the 1950's in Tiworo half expectingthat the Sarnapeople

there hadfulfilled a particular set offunctions in relation to the rebellion, as though being

markedas "occupational specialists" of the tidal zone in the collection of maritime

produce might lead to specialized roles for them in the conduct of conflict in the

262 Straits. This, however, did not tum out to be the case. The onlyconsisten cies I fo und

among people in Tiworo with regard to DI-Til were in their effortsto avoid conflict, and

these efforts comprise the overall substance of this chapter.

Why Tiworo.why the 1950's?

In the Introduction, I discussed how the Straits of Tiworo were historically a place on the margins of competingpol itical systems and then later they were positioned on the

262 My misplaced functionalistexpecta tions were not helped by reading the Masters thesis of Ali Hadara {1998); which set out to representTiworo as a "Sea," and to find a place in it for "maritime guerillas"

(geri/ya /aut ). Hadara includes smuggling and any reports of 01-Til activity in the Straits as evidence of "maritime guerillas." However, "guerillas" is a term that I have never heard people from the region pressed into service apply to themselves, and "smugglers" were not necessarily "guerillas." Interestingly, there is some evidence that smugglers working for 01-Til carried papers from OJ-Til that legitimated their trade qua trade rather than as "smuggling," just as they carried another set of(forged) documents in case they should be stopped by agents of the official government Hadara's use of the sources without cross-checking them with what people whowere actually in the Straits rec�lll isa further problem, fo r, as I explore in this chapter, peoplein the Straits wereknown to exaggerate the presence of OJ-TII to government officials in order to keepthem away; not because they sided with Dl-TII but as partoftactics aimed at keeping both sides of the conflict at bay. ln addition, in talking to fo rmer 01-TII commanders (especially Jufri Tambora) I found that some of thear chival sources Hadara relied on were merely plans and stated intentions, rather than reports, including certain shifts in Dl-Til's structure and the responsibilities of commanders and proposed unitswhich were never actually created or implemented. Finally, his interview sources were dominated by people in urban areas many of whom donot appear to have spent much time in Tiworo during the conflict. The commanders I talked to included all those still living at the time of research who hadrespons ibilityfo r either Tiworo or the areas on which it bordered. Talking with them, but, more importantly, talking with dozens of people who recalled'theirexperiences in the Tiworo Straits during the 1950's, I found that neither Sarna people nor others in the Straits fulfilledany consistent function or role vis a vis 01· Til.

224 peripheryof rival adrninisrative units. Prior to the warfo ught by the Dutch with the Bugis

and other allies in the late 1660's, a war that altered the balance of trade andpower in the

63 eastern archipelago, bothGowa and Temate laid claim to Tiworo.2 Since the late 1 ih

century, Tiworo has been at the margins of influence of two closer realms, also

significant centers of trade: the Bugis kingdom of Bone to the west, and the sultanate of

Buton to Tiworo's southeast. After theDutch defeated Bone in 1905 and soon after

brought the "outer islands" more or less under their administrative control, Tiworo was

passed back and fo rth between different regional administrative units in the colonial and

post-independence periods.

I also describedhow the Straitsof Tiworo were a geographic pocket, seen by

Admiral Speelman inthe late seventeenth century as a "nasty pirates' nest," skirted by

nineteenth century commercial boat traffic, and viewed by bureaucrats and administrators

in themi d-twentieth century as having "always been the destination of maurauders, since

the state hasn't yet hadan armed presence there, due to their position and the difficulty of

communications."264 We'll returnshortly to what so-called "maurauders" were doing in

Tiworo. The point here is how the author of this secretpolitical report from the 1950's

clearly conveys the very un-central character of this watery territory, which regional

powers passed back and forth, traders and steamships passed by, and which, except for

periodic "maurauders," was generallypassed over.

lfTiworo was so "marginal," why, then, would one bother to examine what

happened there during the DI-TII conflict of the 1950's? There are three basic reasons,

which I will first state briefly,and will then go on to elaborate. First, one would look at

263 Ligtvoet (1878); Kartodirdjo (1973: 314).. 264 "WartaPo litikbulan Maart 1954 Daerah Sulawesi Tenggara," in No.2861Rahasia, Bau-Bau 5April l954. held in ANRI Makassar. Propinsi Sulawesi 1950-1960. reg.3S9.

225 Tiworo in the 1950's to understand better a period of major transition between power structures. Second, to examine how rebellion was carried out and how local people participated in, avoided and responded to it. And third, in part a result of the other two, in order to qualify a scheme of periodization that most Southeast Asianists take fo r granted.

I shall elaborate briefly on each of these points below, and then go on to discuss some background on the DI-Til rebellion.

The 1950's were a time of major transition between the power structures supported by colonial rule in which amenable local rulers were propped up by the Dutch, and those supported by authoritarian rule under the nation-state beginning in the late

1950's.265 Indonesia's "long nineteen fifties" -as some Dutch scholars have begun to refer to it - has so fa r received amazingly little attention. Yet social memories of the

1950's are a crucial part of how people there make sense of the present, and the 1950's promise to be a watershed fo r understanding subsequent historical developments, both political and social, especially in Sulawesi, but elsewhere as well. How were these shifts experienced in society? What changes were there, but also, what continuities in how power and authority worked in practice?

Which brings us to the second point: how the rebellion was carried out. None of the "regional rebellions" in this earlypost-independence period can be reduced to a matter of arms and territory. This is an obvious point fo r most social historians, yet fo r those who study Southeast Asia, especially, how populations were induced to choose sides and how social relations wereused and fo rged anew, should be especially pertinent questions. For a recurrent theme through much of the region's history is that scarce land

265 Magenda (1989) has laid some useful groundwork fo r understanding political changes in pre- and post­ independence Sulawesi.

226 was not the major limiting factor. Outside of Java, in any case, land was for themost part

abundant. Rather, control of people has been the crucial factor in deciding contests of

power. How, then, did efforts to mobilize people play out with Darul Islam in the 1950's?

And how did people respond to the rebellion's tactics -the people who in Indonesian are

usually called "rakyatkecil," literally "the little people." But since this makes them sound

rather like Leprechauns, I shall just call them ordinary fo lk, or ordinary people, without

266 denying that there are many social variations among them. Tiworo's mixture of islands,

coasts and waters arguably makes it easier to bracket the question of territorial control,

and to fo cus more on social factors in the rebellion.

Third and finally, is the question raised above regarding periodization.

Throughout most of Southeast Asia, people who lived through World War Two treat it as

marking a dramatic break with the past, in both their personal and collective histories. In

Sulawesi, however, while people remember World War Two as a difficult time, they

often consider the I 950's to have been much worse. For them, what marks a dramatic and

violent breakwith the past is not Jaman Jepang, the Japanese period, but waktu gerombolan - the time of the gangs.

Darul Islam in Sulawesi - background

Darul Islam and the Indonesian Islamic Army of the 1950's did not, of course, refer to themselves as "gerombolan." And, in fact, the rebellion in Sulawesi did not start out as a particularly Islamic one. Let us turnnow to some background on the rebellion.

266 I owe the "leprechauns" comment to an offhand remark made long ago byJanet Hoskins.

227 The Darul Islam rebellionhad three main, rather loosely related branches: one in

West Java, one in Sulawesi, andone in Aceh. In Sulawesi, the rebellion started with

opposition to plansfo r demobilizing guerilla soldiers who had fo ught in the Revolution.

These "irregulars" from Sulawesi weredissa tisfied with what they perceived as unfair

criteria to determine who would and who would not wind up in the nation's new

professional military. They were apprehensive about the sheer numerical preponderance

of Javanese soldiers in the army, soldiers who, in the screening process, had the benefit of

generally higher levels of literacy and education, as well as military training and

organization they had received duringthe Japaneseoccupation. This organization fo rmed

the basis of the army which hadfo ught the bulk of the revolution on Java, whereas

"irregulars" from Sulawesi fought in units mostly on the fringes of this occupation­

derived military organization. The Sulawesi ·"irregulars" were also concerned with the

roles and privileges accorded to Christian Minahasans and Ambonese. People from these

groups had, under the Dutch, staffed much of Eastern Indonesia's colonial civil service. A large proportionof the colonial native army, the KNIL, was also made up of people from these same groups. Itwas particularly galling to those from Sulawesi who had fo ught in the revolution, that while many of them faced demobilization, members of the colonial native army who had fought with the Dutch during the revolution, were granted the option to join the armed forces of new republic (Harvey 1974: 192-219).

Therebellion indicated a failure of delicate negotiations in 1950 and 1951 over the reduction and incorporation into the national ari:ny of units commanded by

Lieutenant-Colonel Kahar Muzakkar. Kahar was a Bugis man from South Sulawesi and a leading Republican commanderin the Revolution. He had been sent back to his native

228 Sulawesi, three months before the transfer of sovereignty from the Dutch, entrusted with

the task of mobilizing guerilla units and preparing territorial fo rces for the Outer Islands

of the new Republic. Kahar managedto negotiate to have these units made part of a

National Reserve Corps (Corps Tjadangan Nasional) with himself as its leader. Yet, in

theend, he was not given the territorial command thathe fe lt was his due, and instead of

being inducted into the Army, the men fromthese unitsfo llowed Kahar into the

hinterland and into rebellion (Harvey 1974: 217·239). Shortly thereafter, the rebellion

adopted an Islamist ideology andjo ined fo rces with the DarulIslam movement in West

Java.

Darul Islam or DI-Til in Sulawesi took place largely in the southern half of the

island. Very little historical work has been done on the rebellion, and what published

work exists gives the overwhelming impression that it took place solely in the peninsula

of South Sulawesi, where, historically, the Bugis have been predominant, both numerically and politically. Southeast Sulawesi, however, was also, fromthe start of the rebellion, an important component of DI-Til's military-territorial organization, and much of the action shifted there from early on in the conflict. Not only has most work on DI-TII fo cused on South Sulawesi, it has, in addition, either concentrated on Kahar himself, or on the perspectives and recollections of the victors, or those who were essentially bought offby them. Furthermore, much of the research on DI-Til was conducted at a time when

Suharto was at the height of his power.

There is, in light of this, anotherobservation I must make about the historical moment in which I conducted research. I had lived in Indonesia previously while Suharto was in power, in many of the places where I later conducted research. I knew that it was

229 not always the case, to paraphrase Michael Adas ( 1992b), that people who do research on periods in living memoryhave access to a kind of source material that historians of the colonial and pre-colonial periods rarely do. He is right of course that oral documentation of responses to unequal and oppressive social relations were seldom recorded in earlier written sources, except when explosive, and rarely with the depth of contextual understanding that a historian might like. Yet, fo r a varietyof reasons, oral sources are often not as accessible as one might imagine them to be, and I therefore considered myself lucky to return to Indonesia for research when I did - shortly before Suharto's fa ll in 1998 after 32 years in power. I was astonished by what seemed to me the nearly instantaneous transformationthat this event worked on people's mouths. Structural change is another story. But for a while, both in urban and non-urban areas, people really shed the paranoid habits of living under a dictatorship and a spirit of openness permeated the social fabric. This was a time when I was able to conduct interviews without being overly concerned about how much the people who talked to me might be busy with not too overtly straying from the government's official narrative of the 1950's Islamist rebellionthat had threatened the unity of the nation, and which, thank goodness, the national army had finally put down. Other stories could now come out, and references to events of local significance could more easily be fo llowed up.

While the Darul Islamrebellion was an early failure of national incorporation and of efforts to integrate the nation's military,how the rebellionexpanded and was experienced by people in theplaces it spread to was largely a different matter. Apart from analytically inadequate assumptions about primordial sentiments, the social dynamics of

230 DI-Til's expansion and how ordinary people responded remain matters about which we know little.

To illustrate some of these social dynamics, I would now like to turn to how Sarna people dealt with the conflict. I will fo cus on three sorts of responses people had to the tactics used by combatants. These three responses illustrate, in different ways, the theme of the chapter, the ambivalent incorporation of some Sarna people into the rebellion. Of these three sorts of responses, I shall analyze lastly the series of events that unfolded after the kidnapping and coerced marriage ofNurdija. Before we get to that, I will discuss what people meant by "having two heads," and the response of flight.

Having two heads

In their recollections of the 1950's, numerous people in Tiworo referred, in 61 Indonesian, to a practice that they called "having two heads" (berkepala dua).2 Unless you have a very literal visual imagination, and I often do, this term almost unavoidably calls to mind the English expression "two-fa ced." But insincerity and deceitfulness are not semantic equivalents fo r "having two heads." "Having two heads" referred both to some village leaders, as well as to a more general tactic. In the fa ce of pressures from the two warring sides, that is, DI-Til and the TNI - the Indonesian National Army, it was expedient to have a village head whom each side could be assured was also on theirs. In addition to this sense of a dual village head, a village head who served both sides

(without, of course, their knowing that this wasthe case), the term "having two heads"

267 With stress on dua, i.e •• on the penultimate syllable of the entire phrase treating the whole as "one word." and emphasizing the incongruous two-nessof it.

231 also reflectedthe sense that ordinarypeople had of being caught betweenthe two sides of

the conflict. As a general tactic, it referred to a method of appeasing them both. In

practical terms, as both DI-Til and TNI periodically visited villages in the Straits but

rarely stayed fo r long, this approach to dealing with them in turns by appeasement is

reminiscent of the way in which strangers to an island village are customarily well­ treated and then sent on their way.268

Such practices mayindica te a certain pride in generous hospitality. However, in welcoming outsiders whose visits are only temporary, they are also a method of enabling a village to remain more or less leftalone. "Having two heads," reassuring both sides about one's alliegances, was a way to keep a village more or less at peace, and intact.

What interests me about this savvy practice of survival is the way it both enabled

Sarnavilla gers, at least some of the time, to keep their distance from violent domination, while it also required that they negotiate the demands and expectations of each side. In other words, even as this method helped them keep violence at bay, it also required that they participate, to some degree, inthe structures and methods by which each side attempted to exercise their authority.

268 A number of times I watched Sarnavil lagers in places where I had spent substantial time treat "strangers" or "bagei," with the utmost courtesy, tolerating their infrequent visits with kindness, but clearly, as conversation revealed, relieved to have them m<>ve on, especially when they were suspected to be police or, on occasion, were apparently unattached young men. In contrast, an aging Indonesian medical doctor who for decades has made it his personal calling to serve the Sarna people in the region, even if sporadically, is a familiar and welcome non-Sama visitor. In a fe w places, I did sometimes wonder where I fe ll along the spectrum and overlap of"non-Sama"/"stranger" (bage1) and "friend" (seheq). These are not mutually exclusive terms, and the fo rmerhas some semantic variation in usage. For instance, one friend may say to another: "the guy standing out on the jetty, what (kind of)bagei is he?" Here, the person is not only a stranger, but furthermore the phrasing of the question assumes that he is not Sarna. One truly cannot help but wonder at the room fo r utterly confused mistranslation in the last line of a book by Follet, in which the American fo rces, returningto the Southern Philippines at the end of World War Two, were hailed · mostly in English, but, "In all the shouting, however, there was one word that the Americans heard above all others. That was 'Bagay, Bagay!'-'Friend, Friend!"' (Follet 1945: 248). Notwithstanding the possibilities of dialect variation, to me, this shout comes closer to "foreigner! fo reigner!" In this context the term may have been applied incontrast to known local boats, on the one hand, and the relatively fa miliar approach of the Japanese, on the other.

232 Usually thispractice or tactic of "having two heads" was used when fightersfrom one or the other side showed up in one's village.And whether it was an indication of their limited numbers or the limited availabilityof seaworthy transportation, both sides don't seem ever to have shown up at the same time.

This dual method of maintaining distanceand providing reassurances also seems to have extended, in some cases, beyond the confinesof a particularvillage, and it resulted in some curious twists. For instance, according to a political report from 1954, a village head fromthe eastern end of the Straits reported, via the District Head in the town of Raha (not exactly next door), that there were 20 gerombolan members, 8 of them with firearms, at the islandsof Bontu-Bontu andPandang-Pandang, of which he was village head.269 While living in the Straitshowever, I was told during one interview, that in the

1950's, if the government was informed about there being members ofDI-TII present in island villages, thiswas regularly overreported. The man who told me this chuckled a little, andexplained that overreporting DI-TII numbers in the Straits made the government's forces,who were apparentlyno less demandingand abusive but were also not very numerous, reluctant to come there.270

This tactic of berkepala dua or "having two heads," then, was not just something people did when outsiders cameknocking. This emphasizes the point that on the one hand "having two heads" was an effort to create distance and to minimize the abuses of the combatants, while, on theother, for it to work requireda certainmeasured

269 · "Warta Politik bulan Maart 1954 Daerah Sulawesi Tenggara." 270 The limited numbers of government forces is echoed in reports ofthe period: "Djumlah Tentara jang ditempatkan sekarang didaerah {sic.} Sulawesi Tenggara dan MOBRIG {Mobile Brigade} tidak tj ukup untuk mendjaga daerah jang begitu luas jang terdiri dari ribuan pulau2." "Warta Politik bulan Februari 1954 DaerahSulawesi Tenggara," in No.286/Rahasia. Bau-Bau 5April l954, held in ANRI Makassar, Propinsi Sulawesi 1950-1960, reg.359.

233 participationin governance, that is, in the practices, processes and-1 would say- cultural

logics by which each side exerted their authoritative sway. The notion of something like

"administrative marginality" simply does not do justice either to the intentionality, or to

the complexity, of the social dynamics involved here. Rather than calling this

"administrative marginality" therefore, I have instead taken to characterizing such

practices as unfolding on the edges of governance. I shall try to illustrate this fu rther in

looking next at flight.

The time-honored practice of flight, nearly a subfield of its own, is an obvious

way ofputting distance between oneself and oppressive rulers and systems, whether it be

peasants fleeing pre-colonial Malay states, or Javanese plantation laborers fleeing the

colonial system of forced cultivation. It would surprise us not to see people, Sarna or

otherwise, flee the intimidation tactics of those at war.

In Tiworo and other areas that were not clearly in the hands of one side or the

other, people were sometimes forced to flee in order to make them choose sides.

Sometimes the Darul Islam fighters actually triedto bring them to areas under their control, but this didn't always go smoothly. For instance, people from fo ur villages in the

Straits had fled to the north coast of Muna. With government permission, they were allowed to move downriver, away from an army post, so that they could live by the sea to pursue their livelihoods. The gerombolan, however, took them by surprise there, for they did not approach up through the mangroves to the mouth of the river. Instead, they landed

234 . j elsewhereand cut inland, on fo ot, across an uninhabited areato firsttake out the local armypost, and then moved downriverto the composite Sarnavil lage on the coast.

Everyone who could do so jumped into their boats to get away. The rebels moved quickly though, ordering some people to take them on board, andto precede them out to sea, in order to ensure that everyone came along. At some point, however, they changed their minds about bringing up the rear and all of a sudden they had to be in front, leading.

This was a precious opportunity for the people now behindthem to give them the slip, which they did, turningaround to go back the other way. The man who shared thisstory with me, Haji Buraera, laughed at the foolish decision of the rebels to lead the way rather than bring up the rear. It was a genuine laugh, with the start of tears in his eyes. But there was also irony in it, for he himself had been stuck in one of the boats with the rebels.

I will return Buraerato later, for he actually did become close to the movement's leadership. For now, I just want to make the point about the relation there seemed to be between flightand forced relocation. Forcing people to flee effectively induced them to choose sides by going to an area already under the control of eitherthe rebels or the central government. Efforts by DI-Til to guide where people fled over water, however, were not always successful.

There were, as justmentioned, a few instances of whole villages relocating closer to governmentcontro lledareas, and some Sarnapeople removed themselves to the local town of Raha. Yet it was oftenthe case that when Sarnapeople fledisland villages in the

Straits, they did not go very far , and indeed returned beforetoo long. The word people most often used in recallingtheir flightwas menyingkir - to move to the side or step

. aside, to yield, and by extension to evacuate. They stepped aside to get out of the way.

235 They were often able to go back to their villages, firstbecause it was hard to pursue them in myriad directions on the water, and second, because neither DI-Til nor TNIhad the wherewithal to stay on these islands on their own for long, if for no other reason, than most of the islands lacked fresh water. Outsiders might not have known exactly how to navigate the labyrinth of the mangroves on either side of the straits in order to go upstream far enough to obtain fresh water from the area's few small rivers. Neither would they have known how to find the cold fresh waterthat bubbles up from springs through the sands of particular tidal flats (one finds it by walking around barefoot), nor how to collect it (by digging a pit in the sand and then letting it filland overflow, pushing out the salt water, which is lighter).

Fleeing from DI-Til in some cases also entailed a further forced relocation by the central government. The government, in it's political reports, usually referred to people 71 who moved aside as "refugees" (pengunsiI pengungsi).2 This is what it called villagers

from Massaloka Island - saloka means coconut in Sarna - who fled south from the western end of the Straits to the southern end of Muna. The government was concerned that among these refugees there might be, as they called them, marauder-infiltrators, infiltrantenpengatj au - "infiltranten" being a Dutch words still in use at the time in the linguistic register ofbureaucratese. The government formeda committee to deal with this situation, one of many refugee committees forined throughout the decade, which seem to have comprised, as well, a substantial method of money transfer fromthe central government to local governments in Sulawesi. The committee tasked itself with a duty to

271 Sometimes they were called pelarian, which can mean "refugee," but also may mean "fugitive" or "escapee." Interestingly the use of the termpe/arian in the March I 954 Political Report was corrected by a bureacrat further up the hierarchy in his marginaliasummarizi ng - and apparently critiquing - selected points. "Warta Politik bulan Maart 1954 Daerah Sulawesi Tenggara."

236 make a list of the refugees' names, to give them food and donations such as clothing and

medicine, and to give them each a modest plot ofland. A representative of the local

government met to discuss this proposal with the Military Sector Commander. The

Commander agreed to the plan, and stressed, in addition, that the committee had to be

firmtoward the refugees and judge or punish them - frequently a euphemism for jailing

them - in case among them therewere those who did not want to be relocated

(diungsikan). In this way, the report stated - in other words, by relocating them and jailing those who did not wish to be moved again - the governmentcould know who

among them was a refugee and who a maurauder or rebel.272

There is, however, a kind of tragicirony here about the government's almost

willful ignorance of the fact that these were Sarnapeople, displaced from homes in the

Straits where their subsistence focused on the seas. It is ironic because there is a whole discourse about Sarnapeople's supposed nomadism forever on the decline, and a slew of related stories - historicaland fa nciful- about efforts, many failed, to get Sarnapeople to settle down. Up there witha popular rumor that Sarnapeople can breathe underwater

(they have gills y'know) are stories about attempts to move them to new villages built just for them by the government. Thesehave failed because, word has it, Sarnapeople -being sea people - get sick if they live on land.

In any case, during "the time of thegan gs," the government wanted to relocate refugees from Tiworo, almost all of whom would have been Sarna. Ifthey did not agree to be relocated, this would, in the eyes of the government, brand them as rebel infiltrators. If, however, you are Sarna and you have always lived on the coast and your life basically revolves around the tides, having a little plot of land might not sound very

272 "Warta Politik bulan Februari 1954 Daerah Sulawesi Tenggara."

237 appealing. Thisoff er to Samarefugees of a small plot in what amounted to a forced relocation inland, was not likely to go over verywell. It was a ratherdamned if you do and damned ifyou don't position to be in.

To menyingkir, then, to step aside from the violence of the conflict, could sometimes result in fleeing to areasunder the defacto control ofDI�TII, or fleeing to areas administeredby the government, where one could face suspicion of being an infiltrator, possibly jail, or relocation to eke out a life on some random bit of soil.

Coerced marriage

Finally, I would like to discussthe kidnapping and coerced marriage of Haji

Nurdija.273 Nurdija is the daughter of high status Sarnaparents. I will briefly reiterate some basic points about status and marriage, which are useful to have in mind in the present context, in order to understand the implications of her kidnapping and coerced marriage. When I say she is high status, among Sarna this indicates a social class ascribed at birth,determined in the firstinstance by one's maternaland paternal lineages, although it canbe "adjusted" upward and downward in social practice. It does not necessarily indicate anything about one's economic status. In theory Sama recognize threebroad categories of status: descendants of nobility, descendants of "slaves," and those who fall into neither category. In practice there areall kinds of gradations and combinations.

Slavery, officiallyabolished, is generally not discussed veryopenly. Considered impolite,

273 Justto clarify, Haji indicates that she has performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, something she did well after the 1950's, and for thoseof you familiar withthe terminology, I should just add that it is common fo r women in many areas of Sulawesi to use thetitle Haji rather than Hajjawhich is the usual term fo r a woman who's performed the Haj.

238 it is talk that might offend one's neighbors, and the regional term for slave, ata, is euphemized in Sarnaby seseheq, a derivative of the word fo r "friend" (seheq). In any case the use of such terms is generally unnecessary, fo r these social distinctions, as

Bourdieu might put it, go without saying because they come without saying. Although in practice there is an enormous degree of varyingcombinations and gradations which may change somewhat in relation to circumstances, the distinctions of status hierarchy are nonetheless widely preserved and reproduced through, above all, the processes of the selection of marriage partners and the negotiation ofbrideprice. People (not just Sarna but throughout much of the region) still work out brideprice "equivalents" within their means calibrated in relation to a scale that reflects the hierarchy of distinctions. The scaled amountsare widely recognized as 88, 44 and 22 "reals," a scale of reckoning brideprice that was noted by Matthes (1874) in his Bugis dictionary and is discussed by Millar

( 1989). The termreal itself is a relic of Portuguese activity in the archipelago, although contemporary Sarnaassured me that it was an Arabic currency term (and indeed it is).

The important distinction here is whether or not one is a descendant of lolo (Indonesian: bangsawan), translatable as "nobility,"but which I usually simply call high status or elite.

Marriages are generally negotiated, although there are also fairly legitimate fo rms of elopement, and it is important to understand that in a marriage one does not just join two people, but rather joins together two expansive kin groups. Although a number of relatives accompanied her when Nurdija was taken, the circumstances were clearly not regarded as consensual. 274 In retrospectpeople referred to her ashaving been been

"kidnapped" (Indonesian: diculik), or, more often, simply "taken" (Sarna: dialaq).

274 In a recent work, Cynthia Werner(2004) discusses consensual and non-consensual froms of bride kidnapping, and the rise of the latter, in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. My own research suggests a rise in non-

239 One day, fairly early on in the conflict, rebels came to the island in Tiworo where

Haji Nurdija lived and they searched all the houses fo r her. She had many potential

suitors, some who did not satisfYher parents, and she herself had been hoping to marry a

certain young man, but as a result of the conflicttheir hopes to wed were postponed and

eventually dashed. "These plans were still being postponed," she said, "when along came

tt these guys to take me. The rebels took Nurdij a to their regiment's base, in the hilly

hinterland of the main peninsula of Southeast Sulawesi. She was sought andtaken in

order to be married to the Southeast Sulawesi Regiment Commander fo r DI-Til.

The Regiment Commander was Jufri Tambora. Jufri is a Bugis man who wa :

close to the leader of Darul Islam in Sulawesi, Kahar Muzakkar. According to Jufri, as

children he and Kahar had been tight friends. Jufri's sister, the fo rmidable Sitti Hami, had

married Kahar and became his fo urth wife. She ran a smuggling ring that helped support

the movement, and it was easy to imagine the large house in which she lived on an

275 obscure partof the coast housing any numberof rebels and various supplies. The Sarna

woman Haji Nurdija, in being wed to Jufri,the Darul Islam Regiment Commander fo r

Southeast Sulawesi, was marrying into a powerful and relativelyhigh-status Bugis

family.

When Nurdija was taken, she was accompanied to the regiment base not only by a

rebel escort but alsoby a number of relatives. It wasa long and ard uous trip over land

and sea:

We took off, then, my mother, my younger brother Syamsuddin, and my uncle ... five of us. We traveled around from island to island, stopping briefly

consensual bride kidnapping - asopposed to elopements (lcawin /ar1) -during the 01-Til period. :m The usual things rebels would have: bullets, uniforms, medical goods, probablya lot of copra, plus, apparently, stolen typewritersto forge documents and tocreate passessigned by Sitti Hami; this way, one always hadthe right papers, regardless of which side might stop one.

240 at Maloang,at Gala, at Maginting, andthen we sailed. One time, the Navy came and showered the sail of our boat [with bullets]. We were shot at like this and ducked down in the boat. Then we reached Masudu Island and were hidden. And after that it was safe. We went ashore at Tapoahi - there's a place called Tapoahi, right? And we walked -at night! It was dark. There we came upon the houses of people who had also fled the fighting, Haji Muhammaq and Ustaz Muhammad Amin. That's where he lived. We stayed there overnight, and in the morningwe took offagain, walking and walking, heading for Marampukaq. And there at the Pulemo Headquarters I was married.276

The main purpose of having relatives along, was, it seems, to serve as witnesses,

legitimizing the wedding. But they were also there to supportand counsel her. In deciding, for instance, how to handle the situation,Nurdi ja described herself as taking the advice of her uncle. He advised her to acquiesce to whatever was requested: "'what( ever)

is asked, you just want (it).' "So that," she said, "is the way I replied." He counselled her, in other words, to comply with whatever they told her to do. Given the presence of guns at the ceremony, this may not have been an altogether bad idea.

Following the wedding, all of the relatives who had accompanied her went home, and only one womanfrom Tiworostayed with her. Curiously, however, Nurdija made a brief returntrip to her village, with a rebel escort, about a week aftershe was taken in order to gather some belongings. When she arrived at her village, though, she fo und it quite literally deserted. Thereason why the village was empty was explained to her in whispers by someone who hadstayed behind, andwho seems to have hidden himself fromher rebelescort. The village disbanded, he explained,due to events that transpired after she was taken.

At the time she was taken, her father, a relativelywell woffSamatrader, had been away on a venture with his youngest son to Lombok. Have you ever heard the sound of a

276 Nurdija, 4 May 2000.

24 1 goat in distress? A friendof Nurdija's later told her that when her fa ther returned and

fo und out what had happened, the sound he made, it was like a goat screaming. His

daughter had been taken away, andnot just taken, but - I should remind the reader, in light of chapter four -taken with no conduct of marriage negotiations whatsoever.

A fe w days after she was taken, a couple of rebel men returnedto her village, possibly to induce others to join her in the hills. Acting, apparently, at the request of her

277 father, one or both of these men were murdered by two of her relatives. The village then disbanded for fe ar of retaliation.

Remarkably, there is a trace of this event in the archives. The report in question got the local place names slightly garbled, due, perhaps, to an administrator's ignorance, or willful misrepresentation on the part of whoever reported it, or both. It is almost certain that the report refers to this incident, though, because of the rarity of the occasion.

"A gang member landed on (an) ...i sland," it said, "and the people there jointly took

278 action and killed him." This was the only incident in the report in which the people - the ordinary folk - murdered a member of the "gangs" or "gerombolan." It so heartened the official writing the report that in his summary, far from claiming that this murder was an act of retaliation by the people, on the contrary, he characterized the actions of the

"troublemakers" as:

actions which only constitute the activityof taking revenge, directed at none other than the people, because the people are now fe d up with the fo rced donations from them and are aware that the gangs that roam about Southeast

277 The two who carried it out knew the rebels by sight, as they hadaccompanied Nurdija to Pulemo. Part of why it is hardto know whether one or both rebelswere killed is due, first,to the quoted archival report (below) which specifies one person; and secondly oral references that do not specifY person number. Oral accounts tended to use a verb in the "passive" without indication of"he" or "they," e.g., "was killed" (dibunuh). It was, however, almost certainly two. Ifit had only been one and the other got away, then there would be no logic to Nurdija's decision tokeep silent on the perpetrators' identitieS, as I discuss below. 8 27 "WartaPolitik bulan Maart 1954 Daerah Sulawesi Tenggara."

242 Sulawesi in general and especially on Laiwuiand the aforementioned islands are not the true armyof Islam as they propagandize. "279

This assessment of the circumstances in which "the people" killed one of the gerombolan has something of the tone of a pot shot fo r posterity, or perhaps the authoring bureaucrat was angling fo r a raise or simply keeping his superiors happy. In any case, it

suggests that the government was completely ignorant about the social dynamics and

events surrounding this killing. Even more astounding than the government's ignorance of the dynamic of bride theft and retaliation, is the simple fact that I came across this secret political report with a portion about Tiworo from this particular time during the DI-

Til conflict. The report was a relatively low-level document on the adminstrative hierarchy, and it was buried in a fileon smuggling.280

When Nurdijaagain returnedto the rebel-held hinterlands, she fe lt she would be better offdead, so badly did she want to go home. The one confidant she seemed to have there discouraged her from doing anything rash, and as Nurdija recalled, would say:

"How would it be if we went home? If we went home, we'd all be dead. II "Why?" I asked. "He'd be angry, that man. He'd turnaround and be mad at us, that Jufri [her husband, the Regiment Commander]."

Miserable as she was at the DI-Til stronghold, Nurdija seems to have played a role in forestalling the revenge that her co-villagers so feared, fo r she apparently knew who committed the murder�, yet she did not share this knowledge with those around her.

279 "WartaPolitik bulan Maart 1954 Daerah Sulawesi Tenggara." Laiwui borders Tiworo to the north and is f:!of the southennost region of Southeast Sulawesi's main peninsula. 80 It appears that the Southeast Sulawesi political reports for Februaryand March 1954 were included in these filesnot because they dealt with DI-Til, but because other parts of the reports concernedcopra smuggling: smuggling reported in the area ofBau-Bau, then the seat of local government, led one reportto press for the establishment of a customs and duties office there. The relevant problem, as far as archival organization was concerned, was not a few skinnishes in a "remote"area, but rather, lost revenue.

243 When asked where she first heard the news from, she said that no one in particulartold

her:

The people (at the base in Pulemo) talked about it. They were killed, they said. It was just news. How it arrived was random. It's not certain who it was that said it. They just said theywere killed. And the people here, too (in the area she currently lives which had once been rebel-held territory), they wanted to go and-you know, wanted to respond (in kind). But they couldn't. He who is guilty is the one that gets killed. It wasn't really known-their what's it (their names). Only I knew that, that it was H----- and 8----- who, it was said, did it. But of course, that was concealed. It wasn't bandied about.

Haji Nurdija explained that in the area held by DI-Til, the people around her all

talked a lot about whatever news they got, and the news of these rebel deaths was no

exception. Consequently, it was not really possible to say from whom among them she

had first heard talk about it. When explaining this, however, the process of recalling it, in

she appeared to be projecting herself back in her memory to the conditions of her life at ,

the base, which included her ownrather precarious position as, a sense, the reason why in

the murder of these rebels took place. In remembering that time, she pointed out how she took care not to reveal the knowledge which, in that context in rebel-held areas, only she had: the knowledge of who apparently had slain these men.

Her silence helped to save the lives of her relatives. One subject in the field intimated that her father had been the impetus for the retaliation and that he had importuned others - her uncles - for assistance. One of these uncles had accompanied the party that escorted her to Pulemo when she was first kidnapped. And he, like her younger brother Haji Suddin, would fo r this reason have been able to identify Nurdija's kidnappers. Haji Suddin was, amazingly, still in the village aftereveryone had fled, when

Haji Nurdija returned about a week after her kidnapping. It must have been he who had

244 hidden himself when she and her escorts arrived, for Haji Nurdija whisperingly

mentioned that she ran into him there at night. Given the fact that her escorts would

probably have known Haji Suddin, since he had accompanied her on her first trip to

Pulemo, it is remarkable that he was not caught, and, given the suspiciously empty village, killed on the spot. Since Haji Suddin was the person she met on that night back in the empty village, it must have been from him that she learned who was responsible fo r the killings.

The details of this story help to highlight an important difference in the social relations of conflict between the 1950's andthe 1990's. Haji Nurdija's comment that people in the rebel held areas wanted to retaliate but could not because they did not know the person guilty of this murder, and that she had this knowledge but kept it to herself, is really quite astounding. The particularity of how Nurdija perceived and dealt with this situation of averting revengeagainst her kin - not just any kin but the perpetrators of this killing - contrasts sharply with post-Suharto Indonesia at the end of the 1990's. Inthe

1990's, "communal violence" was on the rise and was talked about in "inter-ethnic" and

"inter-denominational" terms, and revenge was frequently generalized to any member of

281 a perceived collectivity. Haji Nurdija's ability to help fo restall a reprisal in this way seems a distant, almost quaint thing, from a post-Suharto era vantage point when the discourses of violent revenge have worked in large part through communalist presumptions.

Nurdija remained in the hinterland moving around with DI-Tll fo r nine years.

Although the material conditions were rough, and she was, at first, quite dejected and lonely, the others who lived there too, she said, were 'Just plain good people" with whom

281 Kelly (2000) explores thisas amuch broaderphenomenon.

245 she shared hardships and withstood attacks by government forces. After hostilities

ceased, she left Jufri, was reunited with her father and other fa mily members in Raha, and

later moved back to her natal village, which had reconstituted itself around 1965.

(Ironically, she now lives a couple towns away from Jufri, not fa r from the house of his

sister. This came about as the result of a job posting of a son-in-law, a schoolteacher, to

work in that area.)

In retrospect, Nurdija characterized the wedding ceremony in Pulemo as

"legitimate," sah, performed on a Friday, a holy day, almost in the same breath that she

described how it was conducted at gunpoint. It would be hard to openly acknowledge it

otherwise, to view it as illegitimate, for to do so would be to acknowledge that there was

no marriage negotiation and no exchange between status equivalents. It would imply not

only her subordination, but that of her kin. Yet these are times past, and she is no longer

282 with Jufri. Some ofNurdija's relatives, especially some of the younger ones who did

not live through this time, but also some who did, regard this period with a touch of

nostalgia and hold in a kind of respectful but quiet awe the sensation ofher kidnapping,

and her closeness, in kin terms, to the Darul Islam leadership.

It was a long time before I figured out that an elderly gentleman I had known fo r years, someone about whom I can say I fe lt a strong bond of fictive kinship, was in fact

Nurdija's uncle and one of the perpetrators in the retaliation against the Darul Islam rebels who had taken her. He could not speak of his role openly, in part, because there were children nearby pretending not to listen and he did not want them to bear the knowledge of it. He and I had had many long conversations, but I did not push him on

· 282 The first child she had by him was takenat six months and raised by Jufri's sister Sitti Hami -who had no children from her marriage with Kahar - as one of her own.

246 this one. In fact, he had become old and fragile since I had firstmet him, and I was afraid that asking him to talk about what seemed still to be an unspeakable transgression - he

was visibly pained by thememory of it - might cause his heart condition to worsen.

Nurdija's younger brother, Haji Buraera, who had been offwith their father in

Lombok when she was taken, was the man who had explained how others had given the rebelsthe slip while he had been stuck in a boat with them. Buraera also explained to me that there is a tactic the gerombolan have, that there is always someone who joins and marries, in order fo r there to be perlindungan - a word that means "patronage" or

"protection/' or in this case both. He did not mean by this the shelter one gets from being

28 under the shade cast by a ruler. 3 He did not mean, in other words, the kind of protection that one supposedly gets from having a patron. What he meant, I think, was more like the sort of protection that rebels, underground movements and social bandits in general depend on from the regular fo lk with whom they have connections.

Inorder notto romanticize thisimage of "protection" providedby the people, it may help to point out that "a tactic in which there is always one who joins and marries," such as his sister, and who thereby secures the rebels' protection, could work in one of two ways. It could work either by drawing more of the "joined" person's kin into the movement, or the person could serve as a guarantee - an implicit threat hanging over her

284 head - in the event that her kinare not cooperative. DI-Til did not need to have immediate control over one's fam ily members in order to issue threats that it would go after, say, your parents, if you did not do as the rebels wished. It would, however, have been far more effective to have this sort of social guarantee.

283 An idea one comes across regularly in ideologies of rule in pre-colonial Southeast Asia. 284 Theoretically. thiscould also be donewith men. but then the threat has a very different weight.

247 Buraera may well be correct in this characterization that there was "a tactic in

which there is always one who joins and marries" -astatement he made with reference

not just to his sister but also to the movement's forays into other areas of Southeast and

Central Sulawesi. He would have known better than most about the movement's tactics, for he truly wound up working fo r DI-Til. Yet it is hard to know how widespread the phenomenon may have been. I encountered no other stories quite like this in Tiworo. I did encounter another woman in Tiworo who had nearly suffered a similar fate with a man fromthe national army (1NI). She averted it through shreikingand tears, running away (although not very far), and dramatic protestations including making herself as ugly as possible by smearing ash on her face. In the end, the lNI "suitor" gave up. This is, however, not quite the same as "taking" someone away and having them wed, and witnessed, at gunpoint. If, however, Buraera is right, we could hardly expect people to broadcast stories like this wherever they occurred. And if, as he suggests, fo rced marriage was a regular tactic of thegero mbolan, then it was one aimed at expanding the movement, drawing in new networks of kin and material support, and finding methods to guarantee against "betrayal" by the people. This method of expansion would have been especially apt fo r the border zones of the conflict, and those areas, like the Straits, where

"territorial" approaches were less readilyap plied.

Buraera himself, after his capture, had been pressed into fighting for the TII - the

Indonesian IslamicArmy. (And, in fac t, fo r a time at some point in the fifties, in order to survive, he fo ught for the other side, with the Mobile Brigade ofthe national police.) lnititally, his superior in the m was Jufri's nephew, Suparman, and because Buraera became Suparman's scout or escort, he eventually got to meet this powerful brother-in-

248 law, Jufri. He used the meeting to tryto negotiate a way out of the fighting. Jufri, fo r whom he later servedas Adjutant, offered him instead the option of plying the waters fo r

Darul Islam. And so Buraera became, in a modest cargo boat, a smuggler for the rebellion, travelling regularly to Dili (in then-Portuguese Timor) and to Singapore, and back again to the house ofK.ahar's fourth wife and Jufri's sister, Sitti Hami. This brother ofNurdija's, thiserstw hile smuggler (who, giggling, explained that he had once been called "am.fibi"), wound up marrying a Bugis woman who was, it turned out, closely related to one of the Darul Islam men murdered by his relatives in Tiworo in retaliation fo r his sister's kidnapping. Among Sama people, Buraera's incorporation into Darul Islam was, as time went by, one of the leastambivalent I encountered.

Straits sayyy

Avoiding conflictduring the DI-Til period often meant having to create spaces, not just physical spaces but social ones, that would keep the demands, intimidation and abuses of the combatants at bay. Sometimes this meant heading the other way, which then had its own repurcussions, landing one in areas held either by DI-TII or the (other) government. Sometimes, though, creating this space to maneuver and survive meant a measuredparticipation in the workings, in the practicesand processes, by which each side exerted their sway - including how they collected infonnation on e�h other, creating political and military "knowledge" - in orderto hold them at a distance.

Kidnap and capture were, of course, anothermat ter. Less a question of

"participation.. than acceding to the situation - a subordinating one - and finding ways to

249 deal with it. DI-Til's kidnapping ofNurdija and marrying her to a man in the movement's

core leadership aimed to expand the movement, but brought retaliation from her kin. This

retaliation signalled, among other things, that her kin would not let her kidnapping be

used as a guarantee of support fo r the movement. It also put her in a rather precarious

position: potentially more dispensible. Yet Nurdija, through her silence, inhabited a space

in which.she had the ability to influence the outcome of events. While admittedly the

village wound up disbanding, her silence about who had carried out the retaliation

apparently did, in the end, help to forestall revenge against her kin. It is remarkable from

the vantage point of contemporary Indonesia that she seems to have worked with the

explicit logic that withholding such information would have the effect of fo restalling

revenge, since revenge in recent years is so often generalized to any member of a

collectivity.

Thisspace created by her silence should remind the reader of another Sarna

woman who through similar means affected positive outcomes. I refer here to the

daughter of Papu in the stories of the past examined in Chapter Four, and the important

role of her strongly marked and intentional silence. The situations are not perfectly

analogous, but they have much in common. Like the daughter of Papu, Nurdija wound up

marrying a man from an elite lineage of another descent group, and she lived fo r a time as

a stranger, in some ways very alone, in that other place. The silence of Papu's daughter

regarding her own identity prevents those around her from reading her non-negotiated

marriage as abringing-down. Nonetheless, as I have argued, the story both euphemizes

her subordination and through the narrative presents this refiguration as allegory.

Nurdija's retrospective characterization of her wedding as legitimate (sah), similarly

250 \

euphemizes it. And while her silence had different contours - concealing the identity of kin rather than herself- it nonetheless influenced outcomes ina positive way, subverting the clear potential fo r fu rther violence.

Flight and the practice of "having two heads" were other ways in which Sarna people in the Straits avoided the violence of thecomba tants. Flight entailed not just flight from violence, but effectively, flight to areas held by one or the other side, each with their particular troubles. Having two heads was a way to characterize the position of village leaders in the Straits during the conflict. Yet it was also a tactic of dealing with visits by fighters, appeasing each side as they came in turns (if, that is, they did not simply bum one's village - a common practice of the time as well). Sarnapeople in Tiworo, it is fair to say, did not just have ways of avoiding violence but had abstracted forms of knowledge about theseprocedures, a savvy particularto their location, which at times they sought to maintain, not just geographically in relation to liquid territory, but also socially andpolitically, on the edges of governance.

25 1 Chapter 7

Conclusion

This dissertation is, in part, an effort to find more astute yet complex ways of analyzing what is often butinadequately thought of as "marginality." Going beyond

"marginality" in this case involves more than just getting outside of the archipelago's

"centers," where, as rule, Sarnapeople did not usually congregate. It requires a reconceptualization of the nature of the spaces in which practices take place and a reconsideration of the relationship between "place" and "history" in insular Southeast

Asia morerelevant to the perspectives of seafaring fo lk. The process of how the region's seas were progressive territorialized while "local" identities became more rigidly associated with bits of lands helps to explain, through a kind of structural view, how "the

Bajo" have "fallen" in the administrative interstices and come to seem like an anomalous ethnic group. Yet the static abstraction of this anomalous ethnicity as isolated island dwellers and homeless "sea gypsies.. dissolves the moment we anchor analysis in the dynamics of practices. Sarna mobility, fo r instance, is no aimless wandering, nor has it remained unchanged in the face of shiftingresource availabilityand the transforming political economy of decentralizedindustrial fishing.

Sarna narratives of the past with their frameworks of maritime relocation; the paths taken by manuscripts - rumored, inherited and borrowed; the routes of change in

252 residence due to whim or woe; the disbandings caused by war, the dispersionsof flight, and the courses set by kidnap and smuggling - all of these, as with livelihood practices, illustrate diverse engagements with a world of watery interconnections. Yet this is also a world of complex inter-ethnic social fields. Sarnapeople do not often have an entree to fo rms of social access that are simltaneously structured around descent group and place, especially in "central" places where particular descent groups dominate. This means, ironically, that they may have been more likely to drawon a wider scope of potential

"patrons" than those people whose loyalties were directed serially toward a single patron

- a phenomenon commonly referred to in the area literature as an option fo r peasants under particularly onerous loads. In comparison with this serial mono-loyalty, in a world where one potentially moved about through regions (or at least ports) controlled by different authorities, and where recognition conferred from the top had a portable value, social ties with the elites of othergroups seem to have been more complex and at the same time moretenuous .

I have examined a variety of materials that reveal persistent concerns with how elite Sarnastatus is conferred recognition by non-Sama others. This has happened, for instance, through practices of marriage negotiation, the presentation of /ontaraq as

"proof' of lineage; andthe bestowal and inheritance of passes or letters of recommendation fromroyal sources. In addition, I have illustrated what the refusal of status recognitioncan mean: social subordination, fo r oneself and one's kin. Yet I have also suggested that in boththeory (if narrative allegory can be takenas such), and in practice, there is some room to retrospectively reinterpret interactions that previously seemedmost damning. For instance, some of the materials (especially in chapters fo ur

253 and six) continually point us back toward the importance of the dynamics of interaction

across descent groups and what they imply socially for Sarna people. While these

dynamics impact a woman's status and that of her kin, subordination may nonetheless be

refigured in narrative and in social memory, reinvesting a sense of the past more suitable

fo r the present.

The strategies and practices that Sarna people have used to deal with attempts to

subordinate them are, as I have tried to show, not merely the result of recent developmentalist structures and discourses, but have been generated in longer-term unequal relations both between and across ethnic groups. I have tried to show this in part by including analysis of some sources that would commonly be regarded as relatively impervious to the tools ofthe historian. What I have examined is, in fact, not a history of subordination but the traces left by such histories. Some of these traces are euphemized but evident in stories of the Sarnapast, a past in narrative that, not unlike other South

Sulawesi genres (or, for that matter, Homer for the Greeks), maintains or even promotes the blurring of a line between what may be regarded as a mythic past and what may be considered "historical" time. These stories, the lontaraq that contain them, and other genres of lontaraq in the possession of Sarnapeople are a kind of cultural capital that signals connections with powerful others in the past, and indexes a person's high-status

Sarna descent in the present - not only in the eyes of other Sarna but to people of other descent groups as well. Yet like other forms of capital, what is most interesting is not whether someone "has" it, but what people do with it, and what this reveals about social relations.

254 The methods of dealing with subordination examined here are not lodged merely

in status ideologies and allegorical tales about not-being-brought-down, but also have

salience in practices and memories of how Sama people handled efforts to subordinate

them during the DI-Til conflict of the 1950's.

These practices and the abstracted fonns ofknowledge that Sama people, in

Tiworo, at least, have about them, may be less amenable to romanticization than resistance writ large. But they teach us a great deal about the social dynamics, the tensions and fissures, that run through communities and link them to others, and which

shape not only the course of how a rebellion expands, but also the ongoing possibilities for avoiding violence and for reproducing social worlds that are particularly Sama.

*****

The traces ofa history of Sama subordination turnup in the most unexpected places, like in a joke. On the gth of December 1999, I went to break fa st on the first evening of Ramadan at the house of my oldest and closest friend in the town of Raha,

Kamaruddin. Kamaruddin grew up predominantly in Samavillages and he reckons his descent bilaterally, boththrough his father - a Sama man of lolo descent who had a penchant for egalitarian dealings and who died while his Kamaruddin was still quite young - and through his nobly descended Tauluki mother - Tauluki people inhabit

Maligano, a small area on the coast of Buton island, northeast across the straits that divide it from Raha on the island of Muna. Kamaruddin's own wife is not Sama, and the guests gathered to break the fast were a mixture of her close Muna kin, his more distant kin from the nearby Sama settlement of Lagasa on Raha's coastal fringe, and a number of other friends.

255 In conversation after dinner I brought up the subject of Sarnapeop le who speak

Bugis. There were a wide varietyof linguistic settings in the villages of the region where

Sarna live, and a great deal ofmulti-linguality. I had recently met a woman in the western

Gulf of Bone who claimed Sarna descent but who spoke only Bugis. I had never before met someone Sarnawho could not speak any Sarna, and I wondered if this seemed as unusual to the Sarnapeople present as it did to me. I also mentioned that in one family I stayed with on an island in the Flores Sea, of the two daughters, one spoke Sarna, Bugis and Indonesian, but the other, only slightly older, claimed not to speak any Sarna at all.

In response to this topic, the talk took what I thought to be a surprising turn, as I recounted in fieldnotes:

What was pickedup on by co-conversationalists was not the possibility of seeing in this a variety of causes and contexts of language acquisition. No. There were not stories here about, say, the national language dominating other local language-use to the point of language death. Rather it was preciselythe thematic thread of concealment that people picked up on. What sticks out in my head is K[arnaruddin] explaining to his partner in banter(and occasional boss), Pak Mus, that, "in fact, a Baj o guy, if he's on a moto�cle with you going past Lagasa, he'll ask you, 'Oh, is thata Bajo village?"' 85

This line was greetedwith uproarious laughter. Let me dwell for a minute on why and how it is relevant to the traces of a history of subordination.

First, one needs to know that Lagasa, the Sarna settlementjust south of the harbor at Raha, has houses, like most Sarnavillages, built on stilts out in the tidal zone. Sarna people, andsome other Indonesians,recognize these as Sarnadwel lings. By asking the driver of the bike, "Oh, is that a Bajo village?" theguy getting a liftwas deflectingthe possibilityof being marked as "Bajo." In otherwords, he actively circumvents this

285 Fieldnotes, Raha, II December 1999. "Bajo" was the Indonesian language termused in the conversation.

256 possibility, literallytaking thetalk around it by explicitly presenting himself as ignorant of things Bajo, and evading the chance that he might be perceived as possessing the sort of knowledge that someone Sarnawo uld be sure to have. This is both different from, yet similar to "passing." It is different since the guy in the joke was not trying to "pass" fo r anything in particular. Rather, he was skirting and distancing himself from Bajo markedness. Yet it is similar to "passing" for this effort to remain unmarked, in so fa r as the aim was to concealment something socially ascribed. He did not don a mask, in other words, but merely cloaked an "identity" that he had been ascribed. In doing so, however, he did not become "like all Indonesians," fo r his effort to deflect the possibility of being marked as "Bajo" concealed the kind of information that most Indonesians share without a second thought: one's ethnic or descent group affiliation is commonly the second or third thing one learns about a person after his or her name, at least in the genre of introductions.

Most Indonesians, then, do not take pains to keep their ethnic affiliations concealed from each other. Quite the contrary, theytend to openly state such matters on a regular basis. The joke was funnynot because it made fun of Sarna people for an effort to avoid Bajo markedness where state their affiliations plainly. Rather, it worked as a result of the way it juxtaposed the absurd and the plausible. It was plausible as a general statementabout "B�o" practice from the point of view of a Sarna insider. The absurdity rested on thejoke's revelation of a practice of concealment, one common enough to be generalizable to Sarna people, albeit in jest, by someone who would know. Yet - and here's the absurd part- it was the revelation of a practice of concealment that one was really not "supposed" to expose, at least not openly to a non-Sarna/Bajo audience.

257 ------···-

Although I had not set out to do a sociolinguistic project, thisand similar

examples made me gladI had brought to the field, if not anywork by Goffman, at least a

copy of McDermott and Tylbor ( 1987) on the necessityof collusion in conversation. As I

hoped, it had a couple of useful points that applied to this joke. One was the that, "The

utterance is shaped to fitits occasion. The conditions that organize its production and

interpretation are distributed throughout the system" (McDermott and Tylbor 1987: 227).

This suggested thatalthough the joke was told by someone who grew up in

predominantly Sarnasocial contexts and it illustrated a typeof interaction with which

most of the non-Sama guests were unfamiliar, nonetheless, everyone there got it because

it relied on a shared understanding that Bajo people (as seen by others) might have reason

to avoid revealing their Bajo affiliations. The fact that people got the joke indicated an

appreciation of both the subject position and the interactive social spaces in which this

sort of "face-work" (Goffinan 1967; Collins 1988: 48-49; Morgan 2002:23) made sense.

The main point of McDermott and Tylbor's article is the issue of what people

have to arrange not to talk about "in order to keeptheir conversation properly

consequential withthe institutional pressures that invade their lives fr om one moment to

the next" (McDermottand Tylbor 1987: 232). While the setting in the above joke is a far

cry fromthe sort of classroom structured institutional context found in their article, and

although there is actually no conversation in the joke - and hence no apparent pressure to

keepthings "properlyconsequen tial" -still, the joke shows that there are systemic social

inequalities thatput pressureon people to arrange not to talk aboutcertain things. In this

case, a person with Sarnaaffiliations arran ges not to talk about - as outsiders would term

it - his "Bajo" ethnic or descent group affiliation. And he arranges not to talk about this

258 by deflecting even the perception that he might possess knowledge that could mark him

as a member of this group.

What sort of conditions, then, distributed throughout "the social system," are necessary fo r the fo rmulation of this joke and for its successful interpretation, in other words, fo r an audience to get it? Part of the answer lies in clarifying what sort of conditions are necessary for the production of social practices in which people who self­ identify in some contexts as "Sarna" or ''Bajo," may not openly do so in inter-ethnic settings where their affiliations are still presumed to be unknown.

The joke and the response to it give us two matters - generalizabilityand interpretability - that may help to clarify the sort of conditions necessary to the production of such practices. First, the joke, made by a Sarna "insider," reveals such practices of concealment as both fam iliar, to him, and generalizable- at least enough fo r him to ·say what "a Bajo person" would do. Alongside this Sama-specificgener alizability, we have the ability of the audience - including non-Sama members of it - to get the joke.

One thus need not be Sarnato get it, but one does need to know how Sarnapeople are stereotypically perceived by others - that is, in unflattering if not downright derogatory ways. This kind of knowledge, indeed the simple fact that it is sterotypical, indicates that at least to some degree, the conditions organizing the joke's interpretation are systemicallydis tributed. Taken together, these two matters, on the one hand, the generalizabilityof this concealing and deflecting practice to a non-specific "Bajo person,�� and, on the otherhand, the systemic distribution of the conditionsorga nizing its interpretation, suggest that such practices did not arise ex nihilo or as the result of a unique conjuncture. Rather, it suggests thatthese practices hadconsiderably wider

259 historical contexts of production, prior inter-ethnic contexts in which Sama/Bajo people were at times positioned as subordinate in relation to others.

*****

Only one source offered to namethe starkest formof subordination and to describe some of its contours. This was a document about slavery.

AfterI returned from research in Indonesia,a Canadiancoll eague whom I had introduced to friendsin the field kindly sent me a photocopy of a typescript she was given about Sarna history. It was written in 1991, the year after my first trip to Tiworo.

The typescript appearsto have been written by a man I knew well, the elderly gentleman with whom I was close, and who had so much difficulty talking about his role in the retaliation discussed in chapter six. His name, at least, appears at the document's end, although there is no signature visible in the space expressly left for one. At the end of the document is also has a remark about the context of its production. It states that this history was created for the purpose of supporting the "library" of a local non- governmental organization, one thatwas run by the author's half-brother, which he had originally established to assist Sarnapeople with local projects.

This seventeen page document, in Indoneisan, sets out to preserve some notes aimed at "investigating, examining and excavating the historyof Bajo people in general

2 6 (and) the story of slavery especially in the Tiworo Straits." 8

If we examine the notationsfrom the /ontaraq of Bajo people, as well as fromthe storiesof legend and fromSinrili ' (/ko '-iko ' songs,28 we reach the conclusion that Slavery already existed since (the time of} our Ancestors of old, but it wasn'tas serious as the business of slaverythat took place on the continent of Africa a few centuries ago.

286 " • •• Me nelusuri, mene/iti, mengga/i sejarah orang Bajo umumnya, riwayatperbudakan khususnya di selat Tiworo." "Suku Bajo Dengan Sejarah Perbudakan Mas a Lampau di Se/at Tiworo. "Typescript, p.l7. 237 A genre of Sama song, almost forgotten now, in,which the stories are primarily laments.

260 In Southeast Sulawesi it was just on a small scale, and Bajo people were not the primary agents, but rather were involved as intermediaries and/or just a necessity as a mechanism in the struggle of daily life. For this reason, there were not yet any Bajo people at the time who fe ll into chattel slavery. 288

The author goes on to lay out the main reasons fo r slavery: no written law, no

security fo rces able to protect people and to prevent the fo rmation of adventurers, bad

syndicates, gambling, and narcotics. He explains that there are fo ur different types of

slaves. And most compelling of all, he recounts seven short narratives, stories of slavery that he had heard about in his· younger days, most of which took place in the late

nineteenth century. One narrative recounts an event in his own family, in which a mother who could not bear that her daughter would be taken fromher in such a manner killed both her daughter and then herself.The two were fo und in the morning in a pool of blood and united in a single sarung, the knife still stiking fr om the mother's chest.

The typescript winds down with a brief account of the end of slavery. Its end is portrayedprimari ly as a result of the establishment of Dutch administration in the early twentieth century. And then, on the second to last page, the author directly addresses his readers: "Reader," he says,

let us reflect on it. Imagine after reading this modest piece of writing (that) we then place it honestly on the scale of judgement in each of our. hearts. 289 This is no grasp fo r victim status in a world of exploited "indigenous peoples." And quite unlike anything I have ever encountered from someone Sarna, itexposes the raw

288 Or, more precisely, who became a slave asa result of sale. "Kalau kita mene/iti. baik dari catatan­ catatan dari buku Lontar Orang Bajo, maupun dari cerita cerita Legenda, dan dari Sinrili' (lko '-iko�. kita mendapat kesimpulan bahwa Perbudakan itu sudah ada semenjak Nenek Moyang dahulu, tetapi tidak separah bisnis Budak yang terjadi di Benua Afr ika pada beberapa abad yang si/am. Di Sulawesi Tenggara hanya kecil-kecilan saja, dan Orang Bajo bukanlahpe/aku utamanya melainkan terlibat sebagai perantara dan atau hanya kebutuhan sebagai mekenisme di dalam perjuangan penghidupan se-hari-hari. 0/eh sebab itu belum ada Orang Bajo waktu itu yangjatuh menjadi budak be/ian ." Perbudakan Typescript, p. 3. 2119 "Pembaca, mari kita merenungkan, membayangkan setelah membaca tulisan apa adanya ini kemudian kita meletakkanpada daun neraca timbangan yang ada di dada kit a masing-masing sec01·ajuju r." Perbudakan Typescript, p. l6.

26 1 undercurrent of social relationsrather than avoiding reference to it or wrapping it in layer

upon layer of status anxiety.

How widespread was slaveryamong Sarnapeople? How much were they just

"intermediaries" (and what, exactly does he mean by this - did they mediate the servitude

of others)? How common was it to become a bonded servant, as part of "the struggle with

daily life"? What was the relation, or theoverlap, between the fo rmsof inter-group

subordination that made people into non-consensual kin, and fo rms of slavery?

This brief typescript reflects the author's own struggle with a history both personal and collective. Here, it is patently obvious that past subordination has been a tremendous issue, the tracesof which continue to shape social existence in the present. I, myself,cannot fo rget - even though it never came up again with him in subsequent conversation - that on my first visit to Sulawesi, this man recalledwitne ssing a slave market when he was still veryyoung. Although he says Bajo people in Tiworo did not fall into chattel slavery, the point remains, (if we are willing to give his document credence), that servitude strongly impacted them.

Against the humiliation of a history of servitude, the author has a powerful personal memory ofperf ormingan act that clearly canbe taken as resistance. His participationin a revengekilling against the DI-TII rebels in the 1950's was an act of retaliation fo r their kidnapping of his niece, Nurdija, and it was also a refusal to submit to those who took her. Despite the existence of war-time conditions and the possibility of readingthis as "resistance," however,the memory of killing someone was not, as discussed in the last chapter, something that he borelightly. In the above excerpt, where . he asks thereader to reflect on what he has written and to "place it honestly on the scale

262 ofjudgement in each of our hearts," one senses, between the lines, that perhaps his own

"resistance" has imposed the burden of a moral weight with which he is still strugging to

come to terms.

Rather than a trail of empirical breadcrumbs, a history of conditions such as these may leave traces that are most visible when viewed obliquely in the eddies of its wake.

These are the sort of conditions that make possible a joke by a Sama man in a friendly inter-ethnic gathering, about the practice of a generalized Bajo person who conceals his implicit self-identification as Bajo by referring to a scene ofBajo life that he - willfully, it seems - misrecognizes.

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Archives Consulted

ARA

KITLV

British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections

Koleksi Faoka Zabari (Buton)

PerpustakaanNasional: Koleksi AnekaBahasa ("VT" - verschillende talen).

286 ANRI Jakarta: Arsip Varia Arsip Makassar Arsip Pemda Sultra (microfilm)

ANRI South Sulawesi: Arsip Bantaeng (1866-1973) 1h Arsip Bone (yet to be reinventoreid, but contains early 20 century materials) . Arsip Bulukumba (1930- 1960) Arsip Celebes (1908-1945) Arsip Daerah Sinjai (1950-1974) Arsip Luwu ( 1918-1970) Arsip Propinsi Sulawesi (Rahasia) (1946-1960) Arsip Propinsi Sulawesi ( 1950-1 960) Arsip (Rahasia) Propinsi Sulawesi Selatan dan Tenggara (1960-1 964), Propinsi Sulawesi Selatan ( 1964-1974) Arsip Regeering ven Oost-Indonesia (Pem. Indonesia Timur/ NIT) 1946-1950 Arsip Wajo (1927-1 972).

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Katalog Naskah Kemaritiman. 1995. Proyek Naskah Universitas Hasanuddin.

Daftar catalog, rol 1-82, Proyek Naskah UNHA S. 1995. Sponsored by the Ford Foundation. Uj ung Pandang: Proyek Naskah UNHAS.

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Ricklefs, M.C. and Voorhoeve, P. 1977. Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain: A Catalogue of Manuscripts in Indonesian Languages in British Public Collections. London: Oxford University Press.

287